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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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CNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 



y BY 

D. W. FAUNCE, D. D. 



APR 5 J892 



iit^ 



PHILADELPHIA : 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 
1420 Chestnut Street. 



V Xx^A^nl: 



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Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1892, by the 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 




PREFATORY NOTE. 



These are not altogether " imaginary conversations ; '*' 
nor on the other hand are they verbatim reports. Enough 
that there is a general basis of fact. In addition to what 
memory, aided by notes made at the time, enables the 
writer to recall, he has felt entirely free to enlarge the 
argument from his subsequent study and thought. While 
the actual order of the topics has been presented as far 
as possible, and sometimes the words employed have been 
retained, the aim has been also to meet the freshest ob- 
jections with appropriate replies. 

The book is prepared in the hope that God will use it 
for guiding some struggling soul through perplexity into 
faith. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGS 

CHAPTER I. 
An Introduction, 7 



CHAPTER U. 
The Credibility of Evidence, 21 

CHAPTER III. 
The Possibility of Miracles, 37 

CHAPTER lY. 
The Personality of God, 47 

CHAPTER Y. 
The Existence of the Soul, 63 

CHAPTER YI. 
The Soul's ImiORTALiTY, 77 

CHAPTER YH. 

The Divine Intervention, '84 

6 



6 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER Vni. 
The Divine Intervention Realized, 107 



CHAPTER IX. 
Authority in Religion, 124 

CHAPTER X. 

The Fact of Sin, 136 

CHAPTER XI. 
The Atonejment, 150 

CHAPTER XII. 
Revelation Agreeing with Fact, 165 

CHAPTER XIII. 
The New Life, 181 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Providence and Faith, 197 

CHAPTER XV. 

The New Testament Miracles, 207 

CHAPTER XVI. 
Learning to Pray, .... 222 



HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 



CHAPTER I. 

AN INTRODUCTION. 



"W 



ILL you call at once at the residence of Mr. B- 



and act as a witness to his signature of his will ? " 
Such was the message that came to me one bright summer 
morning as I sat at work in my study. 

" Certainly," was the instant reply. " But is Mr. B 

seriously ill?" 

" Yes ; and yet, such is the nature of his sickness that, 
while he may linger for months, he may die at any 
moment ; and his physician has suggested that he should 
settle his affairs as speedily as possible. He is a good 
deal agitated this morning, for his physician and his 
lawyer are both with him, and they are awaiting my 
return with you." 

]\Xr. B was a neighbor who, for some years, had 

passed my house daily on his way to the Public Library, 
where he spent most of his time. He was a trustee of 
that library, and one of its purchasing committee, and 
was supposed to know, in a general way, something of 
every new book placed on its shelves. He had the repu- 
tation of being a great reader in a very wide range of 

7 



8 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

literature. A gentleman of leisure, with an ample fortune 
earned years before, his whole time, since his retirement 
from business, had been spent among books. He was 
not ready as a conversationist. Indeed, he was, the rather, 
taciturn. But his remarks on any subject were of a kind 
which showed an acquaintance with the best authorities. 
We had served together on a public Board; but his 
somewhat shy manners had hindered any especial inti- 
macy. He had the reputation of being an infidel. But 
from certain remarks, on one occasion, I was convinced 
that he was a believer, in some loose sense, at least, in 
the being of God and in some sort of an immortality for 
the race if not for the individual soul. I had sought 
several times to engage him in conversation on religious 
subjects. But he instantly became silent; and I had 
reason to think that he was unwilling to converse with me 
on the matter. He had showed such a studied avoidance 
of me as a minister of religion, that I was a good deal 
surprised at his request for me to act as a witness to the 
signature of his will. 

I found Mr. B in his library, sitting in an easy 

chair, propped up with pillows, his legs covered with an 
afghan. He extended his hand, and said, instantly, point- 
ing to tlie document on the table, '*' You know it is well 
to be prepared for the inevitable." 

The signature was quickly affixed, and I, expressing to 
him my sorrow for his sickness, begged leave to call again 
in a few days. To this request he made no reply, and I 
took my leave. Early the next morning I received a 
note, asking me to call at his house. I found him more 
composed than on the day before, and he instantly began 



AN INTRODUCTION. 9 

a somewhat hesitating apology for what he called his 
rudeness in not replying to my suggestion of another call. 
He had been extremely depressed, he said, and was 
greatly wearied. The prospect before him was that for 
many months he would be confined to his room, and it 
was only a spasm of irritability due to his disease that 
had caused failure to invite any of the friends who were 
with him the day before to call again. He asked after 
the news of the day, the gossip of the town and the arti- 
cles in the magazines of the month. He inquired what 
new books I was reading, and spoke of some he was just 
finishinor. Twice I brought the conversation into the 
realm of religion, when he swiftly and abruptly changed 
the topic. It seemed to me that he wished to show me 
that he would like literary calls on my part, so that he 
might be cheered and diverted in the sickness before him. 
Kising to take my leave, I ventured a few direct religious 
words. I reminded him that yesterday he had made a 
business preparation for what he had called " the inevita- 
ble," and suggested that he and I, as moral beings, were 
some time to go on an inevitable journey to another world, 
and that it became us to make moral preparations there- 
for. A look of displeasure instantly crossed his face. 
He turned aside his head, and was absolutely silent. I 
added that I did not wish to intrude with an unwelcome 
subject ; that I did not speak to him in my capacity of 
minister of religion, since he had not sent for me to obtain 
spiritual counsel ; but that, as a man speaking to a 
brother man, I could not do otherwise than express my 
religious concern for him. I begged pardon if I had 
offended him by my earnest words of interest in his wel- 



10 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

fare. He turned toward me, extended his hand and 
simply said : " I would much like to have you call again 
very soon." 

Another note from Mr. B : 

"Dear Sir: I have been thinking over your apology for 
speaking to me on a matter which I showed very clearly was an 
unwelcome one. At first I was inclined to blame you ; for, if 
religion be true, and I need it, as you think, then there should 
be no apology offered for it. But as I think more of our inter- 
view, I do not know that I am right. I rather think you did not 
apologize for religion, but for urging it upon one who seemed to 
regard the subject as unwelcome. Perhaps I may be more ready 
to hear about it than you think. Only do not put me down as 
an 'inquirer' in your technical meaning of that word. In the 
intellectual meaning of the word I admit I have been an 'in- 
quirer' for years, and have done a good deal of reading on that 
subject. And I should like to talk with you about it— on its 
intellectual side. I have a great number of objections ; and, if 
it will not shock you too much, I should like to state them to 
you. Please call if you can on Wednesday morning, at ten 
o'clock." 

With this note in hand, another call on Mr. B 



was made upon the day he had named. He was seated 
as before. There was a pained look on his face, but he 
assured me that he was not suffering acutely at that 
time. Producing the note, I said at once : 

"Let us understand one another, and then we shall talk 
on this matter of religion definitely and with a clear aim.'* 

He said : " Yes, we should know on what we are agreed. 
But it was my idea," he continued, " that you would allow 
me to state my objections and that then you would answer 
them. It is true I have a good many of them, and they are 
not in my mind in any definite order. But one will suggest 



AN INTEODUCTION. 11 

another as we proceed. My reading on this matter has 
been larger than you suspect. I have had unusual 
opportunities to study the literature of this subject, and 
it is not boasting to say that I have a fair acquaintance 
with the theories of the European schools of religious 
thought. I am very unorthodox, denying about every- 
thing that the usual Christian creeds affirm. I feel as 
though I had a kind of natural repugnance to each one 
of the many human religions. I have objections to them 
all. And yet I want to know them, so as to see what 
men have believed. It seems to me nothing is too ridicu- 
lous to have been believed by somebody, and that it is 
the part of a wise man to distrust everything on the 
subject except a very few fundamental beliefs." 

He had said all these things in single sentences, paus- 
ing after each ; partly, as I thought, because of his usual 
hesitancy of speech, and partly, as I feared, because he 
was exhausted by the effort. I had not interrupted him 
at any point. After allowing him a moment more of 
silence, I said : 

" You wish, then, to be a kind of free lance in these 
interviews which you propose ; you to attack anything 
you choose, and I to defend where I can. You want to 
have free range over all the great religions of the world, 
and desire me to follow you. But I can see no profit in 
such excursions. Nor has either of us the time. If we 
are to go through all the great religions of the world, 
examine all the arguments for them and listen to all the 
objections, we have work enough laid out for the next 
hundred years." 

He interrupted me instantly with the remark : 



12 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

" I grant that. But how in any other way can a man 
be fair ? He ought to consider all sides of all beliefs 
before he can come to a fair conclusion on any. And, 
as no man can live long enough to give a careful exami- 
nation to them all, it would seem to me that a wise man 
should hold them all in abeyance until investigated. I 
do not see how one can honestly accept any until he has 
thoroughly studied them all." 

"According to your idea, then," I replied, "you ought 
to taste of every bottle on the apothecary's shelves in 
order to find out that it does not contain water, before 
you take the glass which you know to hold water. It 
would be not only a novel but a dangerous method of 
quenching your thirst. Seriously, now, when one talks 
of examining all religions in the interest of fairness, is he 
fair ? You did not originate that sentiment. You have 
heard it from some one else, and never fairly weighed it, 
or one so intelligent as "you could not have used it. Of 
the ' great religions,' so called, only four or five can be 
named. Confucianism can be instantly dismissed, for 
it is not a religion at all, but only a series of ethical pre- 
cepts. In it there is no trace of belief in a God, nor of 
the idea of immortality. Buddhism you would not 
seriously consider for an hour as a religion for yourself. 
There is a 'fad' just now of esoteric talk, a kind of moral 
measles which will have its run among a certain class of 
those who think the new is therefore the true in religion 
and literature. Sir Edwin Arnold's ' Light of Asia ' is his 
rendering of an ancient poem. But whatever of moral 
worth there is in Buddhism came from those primitive be- 
liefs which are carried as a dim memory, onward from the 



AN INTEODUCTION. 13 

ancient Eden ; those underlying traditions that survive 
in spite of all perversions. The abnormal and inhuman 
self-sacrifice of the hero in Sir Edwin Arnold's poem is 
without moral worth as example. Even if the general 
duty of self-denial, caught up from the monks who over- 
ran Asia, and who left behind them traces of distorted 
Christian story, is spread out in the poem, this is, at 
Arnold's hands, a non-imitable kind of self-denial. So 
that neither you nor any other sensible man in England 
or America, however he may like to see in what way Sir 
Edwin can dress up a heathen myth, is likely to have 
the least leaning toward an actual confession of Budd- 
hism as a religion ; much less is any such man likely to 
undertake the actual practice of Buddhism. So that we 
may count that religion out. 

" There are left only the religions of Moses, of Moham- 
med, and of Jesus. These had one source. Mohammed 
finds the basis of his in selections from the other two. 
That of Jesus claims to be the fulfillment of the Mosaic. 
But the Mosaic ideas of religion, apart from those of 
Christ, you would not seriously consider. Practically, in 
our search for truth, we have to consider the claims of 
just one religion, that of Jesus Christ." 

The phrase " search for truth " seemed to displease Mr. 

B . He intimated that his purpose was discussion. 

But I insisted that I had neither time nor disposition for 
a merely intellectual religious tournament. I said to him : 

" I have devoted my life to the search for truth, and to 
proclaiming it to others. I have done this to the detriment 
of my pecuniary interest. It has cost me something to 
be a Christian and a minister. I have a profound con- 



14 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC, 

viction that there is such a virtue as intellectual honesty 
— a fair treatment, intellectually, as well as morally, of 
the highest class of truths the human mind can consider. 
No system attempts their thorough and consistent treat- 
ment except Christianity, for to me it is that religion, or 
none. I am profoundly in earnest about this class of truths, 
and I must tell you, frankly and kindly, that if we are to 
try and find the truth together in these interviews, I shall 
gladly see you, and will make careful preparation for an 
orderly discussion. Only I must insist that when we 
have made a point and agree upon it, we are to set that 
down as a thing decided by us. Take, for instance, this 
point we have just considered — the great religions of the 
world. We need not, we must not, if we are to make any 
progress in the discussion, go back to them. It is for us, 
just one religion — Christianity, or none. It professes to be 
a religion. It covers the ground, and none other so much 
as professes to do that, and the one inquiry is about its 
truth." 

He replied: " You have given me some things to think 
about, both with relation to the subjects which are to be 
considered and the manner of conducting our interviews. 
I see that to raise general objections and to discuss them 
specifically would involve an interminable discussion and 
bring us to no conclusion." 

After a moment, he added : " I may as well say that the 
idea of coming to any conclusion was not entertained by 
me." 

I interrupted him to say : " Why then should we talk 
about the matter if we do not want to reach any positive 
conviction ? " 



AN LN'TRODUCTION. 15 

Instead of directly replying, he seemed to be consider- 
ing my proposition that our discussion should be not about 
religions generally, but upon the truth or falsehood of 
Christianity. For, after a moment, he remarked " that 
I had narrowed down the line of discussion, while it 
seemed to him that a good deal might be said about 
* comparative religions.' " 

I replied " that if whatsoever of worth in the line 
of ethical precept in any of them were found also in 
Christianity, then there could be no need of consulting 
them ; that there were some general moral duties that 
any religion had to recognize ; that some of the Buddhistic 
commandments were exactly like those given by Moses : 
but that the real value of a religion obtained not only in its 
precepts enjoining ordinary morality, but in those impulses 
which flow necessarily from its facts ; that the revelation 
it made of God, the kind of being it presented alike for 
love and worship was also a primary factor in estimating 
a religion ; that we needed to ascertain whether Christi- 
anity was a unique and a special revelation from God to 
man, and that we must remember that as a remedial 
scheme of religion it had peculiarities which separated 
it, by the whole diameter of human thought, from any 
other." 

He remarked : " There is need enough of a redemptive 
religion which shall rescue men from all the others with 
their terrible superstitions. I admit that there would be 
no likelihood of my believing in any other religion. But 
I see little more likelihood of my believing in the Chris- 
tian religion ; for either because I know more about it 
than about any other, or because of its inherent difS- 



16 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

culties, I must be allowed to say, also, because of its 
absurdities of miracle and doctrine, I am farther away 
from believing in it each time I give it attention. But, 
conceding that we must narrow our inquiries to the claims 
of Chrisiianity as the one only true religion, I have a for- 
midable list of objections. I might begin with Genesis and 
geology, — for your New Testament endorses your Old, and 
so Christianity is responsible for what Moses says, — and 
I might go on with the story of Eden, and Adam and 
Eve and the fall ; the conduct of the patriarchs, the story 
of the Red Sea crossing, the barbarous treatment of the 
inhabitants of Canaan, the whole series of wars said to 
have been undertaken at God's command, the institution 
of slavery, and — but, there is no end of these things. 
And it seems to me that if I wanted to defend Christian- 
ity, I would begin by cutting, if I could, the bond that 
binds it to Judaism, so that it should not be responsible 
for the Old Testament." 

" On the contrary," I replied, '' I accept the two Tes- 
taments because one confirms the other ; the older book 
demands the newer, and the newer explains and develops 
the wonderful germs in the older. But, letting that point 
go now, it would be possible to go over your main objec- 
tions one by one, and to answer them, if not fully, at least 
fairly, leaving indeed obscurity just where obscurity is to 
be expected. As to the reconciliation of ' Genesis and 
geology,' there are foremost scholars who, so fiir from 
finding any other discrepancy than that which is due to 
looking upon the same fact from the respective points of 
ethical impression and scientific statement, are happy in 
noticing that general agreement of order for which both 



AN INTEODUCTION. 17 

contend. And the story of Eden has at least nothing to 
contradict it ; and until we get a better narrative of the 
origin of the race, it is as well to hold that the race began 
with one primal pair. Ethnological facts are not only 
not contradictory, but are best explained by holding that 
God has made of one blood all the races of mankind. 
The extermination of the Canaanites, of which you spoke, 
was never carried out. The original tribes were not 
disturbed except as they made war on Israel. A set of 
banditti had seized on the Canaanitish cities, and these 
were popularly called ' Canaanites,' and these wretched 
marauders, these usurpers and murderers, who had not 
the semblance of a right to the land, were given the 
chance to quit their usurpation or feel the edge of the 
sword of Joshua. The original inhabitants of the land 
were Jehovah-worshipers. Palestine was God's land ; 
and the true masters of its soil were friends and fellow- 
citizens in faith with the Israelites, and would have 
welcomed them to the land reserved for them. The war 
was against the usurpers. And even in the actual con- 
flicts, the number that perished was less than those who 
fell in some single battles of our late war. As to the 
miracles of the Old Testament, it would not be hard to 
show that their presence is not as great a difficulty as 
their absence would have been under the circumstances. 
But all these are general remarks on your objections. I 
make them only to show that there is another side to the 
matter, which you may not have duly considered." 

He replied : '' I only named these few objections to the 
Bible incidentally. I have a large number of more 
formidable ones. They relate to the whole matter of 



18 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

miracles, the whole idea of a book-revelation like that 
which Christians claim for their Bible, and," he added, 
after a moment's pause, "these difficulties are numerous 

and formidable " 

I interrupted him to say: "And you may as well add 
interminable. And yet we have only one lifetime for our- 
selves in which to consider them. Surely there must be 
some error in your proposed method of stating seriatim 
your difficulties and getting me to answer them. No 
other subject is investigated in that manner by men who 
want to come to a conclusion. There is not a matter of 
human knowledge which men regard as certain, to which 
objections cannot be offered. Not a fact exists to which 
ingenuity cannot raise objections, and about which men 
cannot allege that there are many and grave difficulties. 
The objections of six thousand years have been employed 
against religion. And to go through them all; as they 
are reproduced to-day, would be a hopeless undertaking. 
Christianity claims to be a historic religion. It claims 
to be founded on facts. It submits proofs. It asks to be 
judged by these. Its alleged facts are true or they are 
false. A few very direct and simple propositions abso- 
lutely proved, and Christianity is true. A thousand 
objections can still be urged. But they do not disturb 
the established fiicts whicli, if true, make us morally cer- 
tain of the doctrines of tlie Christian faith. Undeniable 
difficulties still exist, but they are one after another dis- 
appearing. The friends of this system of faith and prac- 
tice are even more sensitive to these difficulties than are 
those who reject and oppose this Christianity. But we 
see that these things are found exactly where difficulties 



AN INTRODUCTION. 19 

must needs be ; and so they do not disturb us. The over- 
whelminsr weio^ht of evidence we think to be on our side. 
We have certain fixed facts, and while objections have 
a kind of force, their force seems to us like that of broken 
waves on an unmoved rock. Now let us have a regular 
orderly series of subjects for these conversations. Let 
us look at the proofs Christianity presents. If they are 
insufficient or worthless, that ends the matter ; if they 
are satisfactory, then we shall be in a better position to 
consider those difficulties that might seem to touch vital 
matters. Let me have the opportunity to put these 
proofs before you, starting from any point of your con- 
ceded belief. For, on some one or two matters that must 
lie at the foundation of all religious thinking, such as the 
being of God and the actuality ot the human soul, the 
certainty of our knowledge, the reliability of our moral 
convictions of truth and right, we must come to an agree- 
ment at the outset. These are the axioms of our moral 
geometry." 

He replied : " You have given me, I confess, some new 
things to think of daring this morning's talk. For one, 
that the question is concerning the truthfulness of Christi- 
anity alone, since it has no real rival ; and the other is 
about my proposed method of discussion as vicious in 
kind, and as never leading to any definite conclusions. 
I must think this matter through before I see you again. 
I am free to admit that I did not consider my marshalling 
of objections as an investigation at all. You want to lead 
me over a ground I did not propose to traverse. And 
yet you may be right in your proposed method. At any 
rate, by all means, if you can spare the time, call again 



20 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

one week from this morning and we will continue this 
subject." 

I took my leave of him, resolved that any additional 
discussion should be in orderly and regular fashion. I 
had drawn his fire. He had disclosed his own ideas in 
good degree. I proposed to lay out the lines for future 
interviews, and to take up one matter at a time, settling 
each point if possible, as we went on. I had seen men 
of his class before, and was resolved that when, in our 
interviews, we arrived at any conclusion, if we should do 
so, the conclusion should stand. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE CREDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 

AT the appointed time I was at Mr. B 's library, 
and found him comfortable. He was eager to 
begin the discussion. He said he had been thinliing a 
great deal about our interview, and he thought he ought 
to be allowed to name some preliminary objections before 
I made any definite presentation of my reasons for believ- 
ing in the Bible. It was necessary that we should under- 
stand each other's position, and it would be best for me to 
know from his own statements just what was his way of 
thinking as to these matters before I gave mine. I as- 
sented, but also claimed that if the interview for the day 
was again to be of so general a character as the last, that 
somewhere in it he should tell me what were the things 
concerning religion on which he had a definite belief, if 
there were such, so that we might begin from a common 
plane of conviction. 

He thought that fair, and added immediately : 
" This is what I have always thought, that the whole 
matter of religion should be so plain that no actual ob- 
jection could be raised to it — a kind of demonstration, 
like that of a problem in mathematics, so that a man 
could not help believing in it. And when you spoke of 
your own difficulties that you could not solve and yet 
averred your firm belief in the Christian religion, it 



22 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

seemed to me that you thereby gave the whole case away. 
God should have made it so clear that no reasonable man 
could help believing it, when such vast interests, running 
through eternity, as Christians claim, depend on accept- 
ing it. It should be so plain that no man could doubt 
it." 

I replied : " I thought you had intimated your dis- 
belief in miracles, and yet you are proposing an unlimited 
number of them. You are wanting that every individual 
of the human race, on one subject — you would nor think 
of asking for such a condition on any other — should be 
rendered incapable of making a mistake. That would 
be to ask for miracles by the wholesale — miracles, too, 
not once or twice or thrice performed, but miracles for 
each one of the millions of the race on every occasion 
when Christianity might be mentioned or even thought 
of, in the course of each man's life. Why, the few groups 
of miracles in the Bible are trivial compared with what 
you propose to have done. An infallible hope is a great 
deal to ask ; but, in your demand, every man is to be 
infallible. You not only demand that the proof shall 
satisfy the great masters of thought, so that not a doubt 
is possible, but that each one of the ' ordinary ten thou- 
sand' of the race shall not be able to have a doubt. 
Your standard is not whether Christianity shall be rea- 
sonable to God, to Christ, to men like the apostle Paul, 
and to the other great masters of religious reasoning, but 
that it shall be made to appear reasonable to every man, 
so as to be beyond doubt. And such a thing can be 
done only by working hourly miracles on the minds of 
men. 



THE CKEDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 23 

" You propose tliat illogical methods of reasoniug shall 
be eliminated from men's minds, on this one subject ; that 
all prejudices and misconception shall depart, on religious 
matters ; that the moral enmity to condemnatory truth 
which always rises in the minds of wicked men shall no 
more influence them on this thing ; that heredity, through 
which comes so much of human belief and misbelief, 
shall no more affect men on this matter of religious 
opinion and conviction. It would be a stupendous series 
of stupendous miracles. Do you really mean that you 
ask all that?" 

He waited a lew moments before replying. At length 
he said : 

" This is a new view of the subject. I have put a good 
deal of weight on the argument that the truth of religion 
should be so plain that it could not possibly he doubted. 
The position may not be as strong as I had thought, but 
I am not quite ready to abandon it." Pausing a moment 
more, he added : " And yet, I see that my position involves 
the greatest miracles for the least reasonable and for the 
lowest of the race. And if I were arguing on your side, 
I would claim that such miracles would put a premium 
upon ignorance and vice." 

"Yes," I said, "I am sure that you are laboring under 
an impression rather than resting on an argument when 
you insist that the evidence of religion shall be so clear 
that not an objection can be raised against it." 

" It may be that I have not enough considered what that 
position would involve. But in answering my objection, 
have you not laid your side open to a far more serious 
one? You admit the force of prejudice and passion, 



24 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

the influence of heredity and the unreasonableness of 
man, notwithstanding we call him a ' reasoning animal/ 
Do you not see the bearing of all this on what are 
called the ' evidences of Christianity ' ? The credibility 
of witnesses to an alleged miracle is a very important 
thing. Historic credibility is to be established. Certainty 
in this very uncertain world of ours is to be gained, or 
you cannot ask a man to act morally with any show of 
reason.'"' 

"But this is new ground," I replied. "Your new 
position is exactly the opposite of the old. You would 
have it, just now, that there should be no doubt, and now 
you argue for all as doubtful. All miracle you w^anted ; 
and now, you will have none of it because everything is 
so uncertain. Your Bible, in order to be credible, was 
to be miraculous — at least, every reader of it was to read 
miraculously — and now you will have it that there can 
be no credible testimony to anything that is miraculous. 
Are you not a little hard to suit? Either one or the other 
of your positions is untenable. To demand of Christi- 
anity these antagonistic things is obviously unfair. Make 
your choice, and then we can go on." 

"Well, I take the latter ground," he said, " for I can 
admit anything rather than miracles," 

" It is for you, to-day," I said, " to take the lead and 
state your position. I must say, however, that I am very 
glad that you are going to state the negative side of the 
question as to the ' credibility of evidence.' I was intend- 
ing that our whole interview to-day should be devoted to 
that one subject. You save me the trouble by telling me 
why you distrust testimony on the subject. Your position 



THE CREDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 25 

I understand now to be that human testimony on this 
matter is not credible ; perhaps you distrust it on any 
subject." 

" I have good reason to believe in the credulity of human 
nature. I think I could argue it from the readiness of 
men to believe in religions.'"' 

" Pardon me," I said, " we have left religions. The 
whole question is now of religion — of one religion — of 
Christianity." 

" I had forgotten," he replied. " But see that pile of 
circulars. Every friend is sending me the certificates of 
cure wrought by some patent medicine. It is impossible, 
after making all allowances for fraudulent certificates, 
that many of these dupes should not actually believe 
that the wretched humbug did them good. ' Human 
testimony ! ' " he exclaimed, with not a little irritation, 
"why you can get it to anything, however absurd. Carlyle's 
remark about so many millions in Great Britain, ' mostly 
fools,' seems to me sometimes too near the truth. Then, 
see those newspapers" — pointing to a stack of them — 
" and whole pages of testimonials about quack medicines. 
And money is made by them and people believe in them. 
What is the value of human belief under such, circum- 
stances ? And some of these cure-alls — more's the pity — 
are put up by regularly educated physicians. Only think 
how uncertain is that whole science of medicine ! What 
wretched preparations have been used for remedies in 
past ages, which are now the derision of our modern 
practitioners ; the ages that were, too, when your Bible 
was being written. Is there anything more uncertain 
than medical science? Even its best advocates allow 



26 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

this. And yet my friends will insist on sending me 
these advertisements of remedies for my specific form of 
disease, though the doctor says it is incurable." 

"Ah ! then you have employed a doctor ? " I said. 

" Certainly/"' he replied. 

" But on your principles why do you do so unreason- 
able a thing ? Medicine is an uncertain science. "Whole 
ages of mistakes are behind it. Imposture and quackery 
have marked its whole history. Senseless prescriptions 
can boast the largest number of certified cures. Let us 
discard the whole system. Certainty is what we want. 
If we turn away from the miraculous, we have uncertainty 
as the other horn of the dilemma. Now, my dear sir, 
you did not reason in that manner when you called in 
your physician. You acted on the weight of evidence, 
knowing just as well as you do to-day, the fraud and 
imposition which have sheltered themselves under the 
name of medicine. You knew very well that there was 
no 'mathematical certainty' about your physician's art. 
There were reasons for, and reasons against calling in 
Dr. S . You saw which way the evidence preponder- 
ated, and acted on a moral certainty. You trusted Dr. 

S , that he knew more about the matter than you 

did ; that he was no quack ; that he had been a student 
of medicine, and that his advice was worth having and 
paying for. Your life, your precious life, you put into his 
hands. Your objections all vanished before another 
class of facts, when you found yourself seriously sick. 
All you had said about ' charm,' and ' spell,' and ' in- 
cantations,' and ' absurd practices of middle ages,' and 
* patent medicine frauds in this age,' and your frequent 



THE CREDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 27 

quotation of Voltaire's mot ' that physicians put drugs of 
which they know nothing into bodies about which they 
know less' — all this talking against physicians during the 
fifteen years you were not sick, went for nothing, when 
you discovered that you were actually a sick man. So 
diflTerent a thing is it to face a theory and to face a fact ! 
So different a thing is it to talk when we do not have to 
act, and then talk and decide when there is something to 
be done that involves vast issues." 

He said : " I see where your argument leads. Only 
I must say that it takes advantage of what a man does 
when he is sick." 

" No," I replied, " you are not too sick to reason about 
a matter, or I should not be here to talk with you. I 
only want to call your attention to the fact that for many 
years in speaking of medicine you emphasized the wrong 
side. It is possible that you may have done so in regard 
to religion." 

He made no reply. 

I continued : " You asked me one week ago to act as 
witness of your signature to an important paper drawn 
up by your attorney. I have no doubt that you have 
often thought of the mistakes of courts, the knavery of 
some lawyers, the injustice of judges and juries ; of the 
contested wills, the perverted bequests, the rapacity of 
heirs, the quarrels of legatees, the terrible enmities that 
come from legal quibbles over the most carefully drawn 
documents. But these facts did not seriously disturb 
you last week. You have no doubt of the uprightness of 

Lawyer D , and of the equity of the Probate Judge 

of this county. When you have given due weight to ail 



28 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

that can be said about legal injustice, you have still a 
working faith in the machinery of law ; and, like a 
sensible man, you have your will drawn up, properly 
signed, legally witnessed, and carefully deposited in your 
safe. The weight of evidence was on that side, and you 
acted upon it. There is no mathematical certainty in 
the case. It is not a question about ' whether two and 
two make four or not.' But there was good, fair, reason- 
able evidence ; a sufficient certainty to warrant belief 
and corresponding action. 

" Further, my dear Mr. B , when you were in busi- 
ness, you knew that there were knaves in the commercial 
world ; that forged cheques were uttered sometimes ; that 
there were men who obtained goods under false pre- 
tences ; that cashiers now and then defaulted ; that 
bookkeepers made false entries, and that confidential 
agents sometimes absconded. Had you considered only 
that class of facts, you would never have been the success- 
ful man in business you were twenty years ago. But you 
knew that if there was one dishonest clerk, there were a 
thousand who were honest and faithful ; that, if a ma- 
jority of business men, or anything approaching that 
proportion, had been untrustworthy, or had been believed 
to be so, no business could have been done; that the 
foundation of all business is confidence, faith, or trust. 
You trusted men because the balance, the evidence was 
on the side of trusting. For that reason you invested 
your money. You knew the facts on both sides. And 
you had an influential belief, a working faith in the 
trustworthiness of business men and business methods. 
It was not mathematical evidence, and you had the good 



THE CREDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 29 

sense not to require it to be such. Business scepticism 
would have been unreasonable in your case, and you 
would have been without your snug fortune to-day. You 
acted rightly, on probability, not perhaps recalling the 
dictum of Butler that ' probability is the guide of life.' 
On evidence very far from certitude, the statesman is 
obliged to act, the philosopher to propound his doctrines, 
and the physician to prescribe for his patient. There are 
difficulties in religion, and, for that matter, in everything 
else on which men are called to act. If we are going to 
wait for mathematical certainty, we may be excused from 
action anywhere in life. For even the axioms on which 
geometry is founded are assumed rather than proved. 
It works well to take them, believe them, and act upon 
them. I urge action on religion exactly as elsewhere on 
good, fair evidence, notwithstanding difficulties exactly 
parallel to those met by physicians and their patients, 
by business men and their customers. 

" Of course, all evidence is not good evidence. There 
were poor witnesses in the first and in the fourth Chris- 
tian centuries, as there are in this nineteenth century. 
Some witnesses in every century are untrustworthy, and 
others are credible. To urge, as some have done, against 
the credibility of the Christian documents, that in the 
centuries when they were written, there were poor 
witnesses ; that superstition then abounded in which 
credulous people believed, and that therefore all witness- 
ing in those centuries is unreliable, is a style of argument 
that is as lacking in fairness as it is in logic. Each century 
has its peculiar stamp, as each man has his own personal 
equation. But good, fair, reliable evidence is obtainable 



30 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

to-day as to facts now occurring, though there never was an 
age Avith more humbug and imposition than our own. 
Could Mornionism have so risen and flourished by appeal 
to evidence in any other century than this? But credi- 
ble evidence is still obtainable for actual occurrences. 
Every age has had ftiir witnesses, and beside them are 
men not to be believed. No truth but can gain testimony ; 
no falsehood but can secure false witnesses. Instead of 
saying that everything can be proved, which is equiva- 
lent to saying that nothing can be proved, we are to sift 
testimony and give credit where credit is due. It is 
absurd to deny the force of all testimony in a given age 
because of incompetent evidence in support of supersti- 
tion and fraud. The work of every court in Christen- 
dom to-day is to sift testimony ; to weigh the worth 
of witness for and against a given case ; to find out the 
preponderance of the evidence. It is the same with a 
merchant who buys and sells in the world's markets. He 
judges and weighs, and so decides. In law, in medicine, 
in politics, in every department of human activity, we 
do not always act on any mathematical certainty, but we 
listen to statements, weigh the character and estimate 
the worth of conflicting testimony, and act according to 
weight of the evidence. It must be so in religion. If not, 
then why not?" 

He replied, after a few moments' thought : " Yes, I 
think the analogy good and the reasoning fair. I am 
afraid my new ground is hardly more tenable than the 
old. But " — after a pause — '• I have two things to say. 
The first is that if we are to act in religion in this way, 
after discoverins^ the balance of evidence as we do in 



THE CREDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 31 

ordinary affairs, and I own that I do not see why we 
should not, then what need have we for a Bible in relig- 
ion any more than for a Bible in medicine ? The second 
thing I want to say is, that your argument for the re- 
liability of evidence is better anywhere else than on a 
historic question. Your New Testament claims to be a 
historic book, and we want historic certainty, a much 
more difficult thing to secure than any of these other 
kinds you have named." 

I answered : "As to your first remark about our 
not needing the Bible, let me say that I will take it up 
in due time. We must not get too far away to-day from 
this matter of the ' credibility of evidence.' " 

" You must admit," he said, " that when it is difficult 
for a police court to decide on the evidence in the case 
of a street row, that when there are hardly any two men 
who, looking out at a window on the same, scene, can 
report a fact in the same way, when each man's person- 
ality colors his vision in commonest things, you must 
surely admit that events historically distant are liable 
to be so inaccurately reported as to make any evidence 
for them extremely doubtful, especially when they are so 
far away as nineteen slowly moving centuries from our 
time, and when they relate to such very peculiar occur- 
rences as those which your New Testament writers alle.sre 
to have taken place." 

" Take care," I said, "for you are striking not only at 
Christianity as a historic religion, but at all human 
history as well. History is a thing of yesterday, and also 
of a thousand years ago. And whether you credit yester- 
day's alleged occurrences or those of a thousand years 



32 HOURS WITH A SCEl'TIC. 

ago, depends not at all on the nearness of the one set of 
lacts and the remoteness of the other, but on the reliability 
of the witnesses in either case. Yesterday's occurrence 
supported by untrustworthy witnesses is less certain than 
that of a thousand years ago supported by competent 
testimony. Within this ' historic period ' you may leave 
out the question of the near and the remote, and the 
facts of Christianity fall far within the times of undoubted 
and reliable history," 

"But," he replied, "the old Roman fables are now 
eliminated from genuine and received history." 

"True," I answered. "But those were outside the 
recognized circle of credible history." 

" But," he instantly replied, " your Old Testament is 
far beyond that limit." 

" Yes," was the answer. " Of itself, it is more ancient. 
But you insisted in our last interview, that the New 
Testament, by its endorsement of the Old Testament, 
was responsible for what you called its cruelties, etc. It 
is a poor rule that does not work both ways. And so, 
for our discussion, let it be true that because the New 
endorses the Old Testament, we need not go back beyond 
the New Testament time, which is far within the period 
of authentic history. Remember that Euclid had lived, 
and that geometry has not advanced by the breadth of a 
hair since his day : that ' the science of evidence ' was as 
well developed at the time when the Gospels began to 
be known as it is in our own times. The clear legal 
conceptions, afterward gathered up into the Justinian 
code already existed in Christ's time. And the Roman 
was then, as always, a jurist, with an eye for legal proof. 



THE CREDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 33 

The advent of the documents was in the clearest, intel- 
lectual age of the world ; and from that statement many 
would not except our nineteenth century, a century so 
great in material life that its intellectual life has suffered 
eclipse therefrom. 'These things were not done in a 
corner.' " 

I further insisted that he was as much bound to account 
for the New Testament as a literary fact coming into 
that age as I was ; that he, as an intelligent man, was 
under as much obligation as myself to have a reason for 
what he did with the Bible. If he rejected it,, it must be 
for a consistent reason, and that a series of miscellaneous 
objections was not a theory of the Book which was the 
only real candidate on earth for the place of a Revelation 
from God ; that he must account for not only the Book, 
but for the fact that the evidence for it had prevailed in 
the most critical century of human history. 

That usually, they who had made this matter of its his- 
toric evidence the line of their special study, were best con- 
vinced that the evidence was sound and trustworthy; 
that the New Testament did not originate in an age of 
fable, but in the Augustan age, the least credulous age 
in history ; that our present Gospels had stood the test 
of critical investigation, when, centuries ago, the false 
and mythical Gospels had been separated from the true 
by the same process that had been applied to myths and 
Roman story within the last one hundred years ; that 
the Gospels made a distinct claim to be veritable his- 
toric documents, and that he was bound to account for 
their existence and the credence they had gained as much 
as I was : that he was as much under obligation to have 



34 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

a good, fair, reasonable theory on which he should reject 
them as I to have a good theory for accepting them ; that 
he and I and every well-informed man accepted the 
writings of historians older than the New Testament 
without hesitation and with no hint that these writings 
were untrustworthy because evidence of alleged fact 
could not in those ages be obtained. It was not a question 
of an ancient or a modern event, but solely one of the 
trustworthiness of the writers. I said : 

" You must admit that there is such a thing as historic 
evidence and historic credibility. Events as old as those 
of the Gospels can be proved." 

He admitted it, only saying that it was one thing to 
say that an event occurring in that century can be 
proved, and quite another to admit that a specific thing 
is actually proven ; to which I, of course, assented ; since 
the credibility of evidence was the only point I was 
aiming to establish, as against his general denial of evi- 
dence as trustworthy on historic matters. 

He suggested that the originals of the documents of 
the New Testament were lost ; and I reminded him that 
it was the same with the autograph copies of Homer and 
Virgil and Herodotus ; that even the original manuscript 
of Shakespeare had disappeared, and so had that of 
Bacon's immortal work — all of which was to be expected, 
and might be regretted by antiquaries, but was not re- 
garded as imperilling the authenticity or credibility of 
their writings, or the trustworthiness of the copies at 
present known. I said that Senators of the United 
States argued on the constitutionality of certain bills, 
reading the Constitution from any printed copy that they 



THE CREDIBILITY OF EVIDENCE. 85 

happened to have on hand, and no man raised the legal 
quibble that they did not bring into the Supreme Court 
Room or into the Senate Chamber the original document 
from its case in the State Department, and put their finger 
on the line and the word they quoted. 

The good common sense of fair-minded men did not go 
into the legal requirement of the original document. 
Judging from its present faded appearance, in less than 
one hundred years, the original copy of the famous Declar- 
ation of Independence will soon be illegible, and, it may 
be, will be destroyed by the tooth of time. But not 
one of all the millions of Americans who have never 
seen the original, but who have the document several 
removes from the manuscript copy, will have any doubt 
about any line or word of it. 

The proof-reading of the copyists of the olden time 
was as accurate as that of the Riverside Press of to-day. 
There has been no need of a miracle to secure the trans- 
mission of a document since the beginning of the Christian 
era. Authentic writings on other subjects, which were 
far more likely to be destroyed than those of the New 
Testament, are existing in their substantial integrity, 
and scholars discuss them, line by line, to-day. True, 
there are also " various readings " in these writings, 
exactly as in the copies of the New Testament. But 
these do not destroy the value or integrity of Homer and 
Virgil any more than in the case of the Four Gospels. 

He said : " I thought you believed in the inspiration 
of the New Testament ? " 

I answered : " That matter will come up in due order. 
I am trying now to show that there can be trustworthy 



36 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

history in the case ; that the documents can be historically 
accurate ; that, considered simply as so much literature, 
these Gospels and epistles are capable of being authenti- 
cated. There is nothing inherently impossible in their 
credibility." 

" I admit," he said, " that I cannot dispute your 
position. And T would be ready to grant the substantial 
credibility of the narratives, at least, and would urge 
nothing against it, if the New Testament contained only 
ordinary historic facts. But there are the miracles. It 
is no use to talk about it. I cannot believe in miracles." 

At this point Mr. B seemed not a little exhausted. 

I looked at my watch and found that the conversation, the 
outline of which is herewith given, had occupied an hour 
and a half. Apologizing for its length, I hastily closed 
my visit. He exacted from me the promise of an hour 
for the following week. He reiterated his words, " I can- 
not believe in miracles," and asked me to be sure to take 
up the discussion at that point at the very next inter- 
view. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES. 

T71SITIKG Mr. B the week following, I found 

V him in his library and more comfortable than I 
had feared. After the usual inquiries, he took up eagerly 
the discussion at the point where he had left it. 

He said : " On thinking the' thing over, I confess my 
misgivings as to my former position, that the evidence for 
Christianity ought to be so certain that a man could not 
possibly have a doubt; and, also, my intimation that 
historically credible evidence cannot come to us from the 
Augustan age for an alleged event. But when an alleged 
event in that or in any other age is miraculous, I demur. 
I cannot believe in a miracle." 

He repeated the assertion two or three times with 
unusual energy and positiveness in his tone and manner. 

I remarked to him " that his assertion was apparently 
his Gibraltar," and he replied "that he could not, he 
thought, be driven from that position." 

I said : " Now tell me why you cannot believe in a 
miracle." 

" Well, I would say, first of all, it is incredible that 
such a thing should occur." 

" Incredible to whojn f " I asked. " It is not so to me, 
nor to millions of the human race, who can see good 
reasons for divine intervention at certain great eras in 
the moral history of the world. To most men there would 

37 



38 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

seem to be a probability of such events as things occur- 
ring not often, but coming at the introduction of new 
dispensations, and as the authentication of a divine • 
message or messenger. They are not probable as daily 
occurrences. But. that I do not claim for them. The 
incredible thing to me would be that they should never 
be granted to men. And when you say ' a miracle is 
incredible,' I ask again, ' incredible to ivliomf ' Incredi- 
ble to you, in your present mood, a miracle may be. 
But you must not claim that it is incredible to universal 
man. Men as good reasoners as are you and I have 
accepted miracles. You must not say that miracles 
belong to the category of things impossible to be believed ; 
incredible, because the mind of man cannot credit them. 
Men do credit miracles. The human mind is so consti- 
tuted as to be able to receive them, under certain circum- 
stances. I think you would say that if there were to be 
given a revelation from God, similar to that claimed for 
the Bible, you would expect God to furnish something of 
the kind, and you would require miracles before you 
would believe in that kind of Bible." 

" I certainly should," was his quick reply. 

"So then," I said," when you call miracles incredible 
you mean only this, that they are incredible not to 
mankind — for mankind has almost universally believed 
in miracles of some sort — but that the miracles of the New 
Testament are incredible to you. You may recall the 
fact that Hume, arguing for the rejection of all miracles 
on the ground that they were contrary to the uniform 
experience of mankind, said, ^ I have discovered an 
argument which will be useful as long as the world en- 



THE POSSIBILITY OF MIEACLES. 39 

dures, jor so long I presume ivill the account of miracles he 
believed.^ Well, if men will believe them so long as the 
world endures, what becomes of his own celebrated 
argument about * miracles as contrary to the universal 
experience of mankind.' Miracles are credited by as 
fine and careful and scholarly minds as ever were found 
on the phmet." 

•' But," he answered, " all men are not reasonable on 
every pointy and the matter of religion is the one on 
which they are most lacking in reason. I cannot avoid 
the conclusion that miracles are unreasonable." 

" Unreasonable to whom ? " I said. " Take care how 
you talk about the ' other eleven unreasonable jurymen 
on the jury.' Besides, miracles are God's things. That 
they are reasonable to him is enough reason for them ; 
his is the one standard reason. He is not obliged, when, 
in his wisdom, he sees that a miracle is needful to his 
plans of gracious intervention and salvation, to make the 
reasons for the miracle plain to us before he works it. 
Afterward we may be delighted in seeing it as the 
manifestation of his love and grace. The question is 
this : Is the miracle reasonable to him ? It may or may 
not be a reasonable thing to a given man at a given 
time. To two men of equal reasoning power, there may 
be a very unequal knowledge of the facts in a given case. 
The one man may give a verdict on the facts as he knows 
them. The other may know certain vital facts not before 
the mind of the former, and so may render just the 
opposite verdict. Only one being knows all the facts of 
God's broad plan. God only can decide whether a miracle, 
in given circumstances, is needed, and so is reasonable. 



40 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

'■ Still further, a miracle is always an inference from 
facts, and these facts can always be proved as facts ex- 
actly as can any other facts. In strictness of language, 
facts are not miraculous ; we infer the miracle from 
them. This table before us is made of black walnut. 
Let us suppose now a miracle — a miracle, not at all of 
the New Testament kind, having as those miracles always 
have, a moral end ; but a miracle that is a mere freak 
of power. This is a fact, that here is a black walnut 
table. We shut our eyes ; we open them again ; and, lo ! 
the table is marble. It was of wood ; it is of stone. The 
first fact and the second fact are proved in exactly the 
same way. It takes no more evidence of eyesight and 
of touch to assure us in the one case than in tiie other. 
We infer the miracle. That is all there is about it. The 
fact of wood in one case and stone in the other are 
equally facts to be proven by the senses of touch and 
sight. The evidence, both in kind and in amount, that 
will prove tlie one to be wood will prove the other to be 
stone. To you and to me there would be miracle, as an 
inference. But a man who saw the walnut table at ten 
o'clock this mornino-, and who should see the marble one 
at ten o'clock to-morrow morning, would need no special 
evidence for the existence of the one table over the other. 
He could testify that he had seen both. His evidence 
would be credible in both cases. A fact is a fact ; that 
it is miraculous is our inference about the fact." 

He looked up with surprise, and finally said : '' I have 
always thought that a miraculous ftict must have miracu- 
lous evidence ; but I see that it is not so." 

" What would vou sav," he remarked, after a mo- 



THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES. 41 

merit's pause, " to the proposition that a miracle is im- 
possible?" 

" In what sense impossible ? Do you mean impossible 
as related to God's plan, and as related to God's power ; 
or do you mean that you think a miracle is impossible 
in the sense that it cannot be proved by evidence ? " 

He replied : " Well, take it in all three senses. It 
might be well argued, first of all, that God has made 
perfect laws ; has made out a perfect scheme of things, in 
which, so far as we can see, there is no place for miracle." 

" But," I answered, " is the ' physical scheme of things ' 
the only scheme of things there is ? And, if it were the 
all, if it were not a subordinate scheme, can you show 
that the physical scheme of things at special eras has 
no place for miracle ? Creation, whether by evolution as 
its form or not, must have somewhere started in the 
Divine fiat. ' He spake and it was done.' It was a 
something that came in upon what was the order of 
things before it ; and that was miracle with reference to 
the preceding scheme. The wJiole physical plan includes 
the miraculous creation of the germ or germs out of 
which all the physical universe has- grown. It may 
comprehend, also, its ending as it did its beginning, and 
unseen interventions as well, along its whole course. 
But the physical plan is not the whole plan of things. 
The physical is naturally subject to the moral scheme of 
things ; and the two, the physical and the moral scheme 
are together the one great system of God's universe. 
The final ends must be moral ends. If God's moral ends 
require miracles, miracles will obtain ; and when they 
come there will not be anything not provided for origin- 



42 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

ally in the perfect plan. I shall try to show you in the 
course of our discussion that the moral scheme requires 
a supernatural personage, a miraculous personage, about 
whom miracles necessarily gather, since they are wrought 
for moral ends, and that these miracles are not so much 
buttresses of moral teachings as they are the fit expres- 
sion of moral ideas in physical forms. In a single 
sentence, this is my reply to your question : That no man 
knows the whole reach of God's plans, the whole reach 
of the ' established order of things,' and so no man is 
entitled to say that the whole moral and physical order 
of things is such as to make miracles impossible. 

" As regards the second point, viz., miracles impossible 
with relation to the power that is able to perform them, 
nothing need be said. For surely, if there be a God, he 
is able to work a miracle." 

He at once assented, adding, "It would be absurd to 
hold that God could not, so far as power is concerned, 
do a miraculous thing. But I am not satisfied," he con- 
tinued, " with your former argument." 

" Let me state it again," I said. " It is, in a word, 
that when a man says a miracle is impossible because it 
is contrary to the * whole established order of things,' he 
assumes the Omniscience, which knows the whole order 
of things both physical and moral, and has discovered 
that a miracle can have no place anywhere in God's 
wide universe. To say that a miracle is impossible is to 
assume that one knows all the possibilities in God's plan 
of things." 

He was silent ; but whether he yielded the point or 
not, I could not decide. 



THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES. 43 

After a little he remarked ; " Your second point, viz., 
a miracle possible with reference to an adequate power 
to perform it, no believer in a God would deny. But 
when Hume says a ' miracle is impossible,' I think he 
refers to the impossibility of proving it by competent 
evidence." 

I replied : " It would be a singular thing to say that 
God could do the miracle, but could not prove that he had 
done it ! That were a startling absurdity when stated in 
plain English. And yet, that is Hume's argument put into 
other words. He would claim that ' no amount of evi- 
dence can prove a miracle,' because ' a miracle is con- 
trary to our experience, and nature does not transcend 
certain limits.' But how does Mr. Hume know that 
nature does not transcend the limits he fixes for her. 
ISo testimony, though it were of one's own senses, to a 
miracle would be accepted as valid proof of one ; because 
it is ' contrary to uniform testimony.' And this is the 
curious result : That the man who should have the testi- 
mony of his own senses to a miracle is to leave that, and 
fall back on the trust in the testimony of others who have, 
not seen it and who aver that their testimony is in 
accordance with the ' general experience of mankind.' 
The truth is, God cannot be shut up to such limits as to 
be able to perform a miracle and then not be able to 
prove it — i.e., furnish testimony sufficient to make it 
credible." 

" But," he answered, very quickly, '*' you would not 
receive the fact of a miracle on no better or stronger 
evidence than you would an ordinary fact." 

" I must say, as I said just now, a fact is a fact, and 



44 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

it is an inference that any fact is miraculous. But then 
the true miracle is not to be judged of apart from its 
moral relations ; and there is needed especial evidence 
of these as well as of the facts. Tiie physical fact is not 
the only one. And the fact judged to be miraculous is 
only one stone in an arch, and it has fellow-stones on 
either side of it. I would scan the evidence on both 
points very closely. I would consider the whole matter 
of the trustworthiness of the witnesses, and of their likeli- 
hood to deceive or to be deceived. But I would also 
give weight to the setting of the alleged miracle, in time 
and place, and to the end sought, and to the connection 
with moral teaching, and to the miracle considered with 
reference to the miracle- worker." 

*' According to that view, you would," he said, " require 
fewer and poorer witnesses for a miracle than for an 
ordinary event." 

" No," I said, "you mistake me. I make a difference 
between witness and evidence. The witnesses are to be 
carefully watched, and their testimony most severely 
scrutinized. But that of eyewitnesses is not all the 
evidence. Evidence comes, also, from the fi;ness of the 
teaching to go with the miracle ; from the fitness of the 
miracle-worker to be entrusted with the working of it ; 
from the harmony of his character with his mission ; 
from the precise era in which the miracle is wrought — 
since miracles are not promiscuously scattered through 
the Bible, but come in eras ; — from the miracle, not 
merely or even mainly, as an evidential thing, but as a 
part of the system itself, in which a supernatural religion 
is in the process of revelation, so that the miracle is the 



THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES. 45 

natural thing to the circumstances, and the reasonable 
thing in the system where we find it. By all means let 
us have the witnesses ; let us have no mistake about their 
facts. But their witness is not more important than is 
the evidence that comes to us from this wonderful har- 
mony of the miracle with the moral teaching. And 
when any man shall get into the heart of God's plan of 
things, and see how part corresponds to part, and all 
with the obvious design of the vast scheme, he will find 
that the ' Christian evidences ' are superabundant. There 
will come upon him the conviction that the miracle of 
Christ is no separate thing, no mere exhibit of power, 
but that it exactly befits the moral character and the 
moral mission of him who performs it ; and instead of 
saying it is 'incredible,' he will feel that it commends 
itself easily to our minds even as it comes easily and 
graciously from his hands." 

In this report of my third conversation with Mr. 

B , I have given not only the argument on that 

occasion, but the general line of our reasoning in the 
two subsequent interviews. He had begged the privilege 
of going over my argument on the topic of " Miracles 
Impossible," and of reviewing his copious notes upon 
that theme. As nothing new was elicited, in either his 
objections or my arguments at the other interviews, I 
have condensed the substance of three conversations into 
one chapter. I was certain that his confidence in his 
position had been thoroughly shaken. He had repeatedly 
said : " I never saw these things in this light be- 
fore." The gladiatorial spirit, which had sought only 



46 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

an intellectual encounter, had largely disappeared. Moral 
earnestness was rapidly taking its place. He was rous- 
ing himself to see the interest involved in these things 
of religion. There was obviously a desire, more or less 
strong, to know the truth. He was gradually becoming 
ready to be intellectually fair as well as morally right. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 

IT was a beautiful morning when, according to ap- 
pointment, I called again on Mr. B , to find him 

not so comfortable as at our last interview. He was 
sitting in his reclining chair, and looking so worn that I 
at once proposed to defer our conversation until another 
day. He would not consent. He owned that he had 
become deeply interested in the theme; more so than 
ever before. It was occupying his thought very fully. 
Some of my answers to his objections had opened new 
lines of reflection to him. He said that " my side of the 
question," as he called it, — though I had once or twice 
objected to his phrase — '* bad gained in his mind, by the 
fairness with which I had allowed him, thus far, to state 
his difficulties ; that he had thought that ministers were 
not acquainted at all with modern objections, and did 
not care for them, but persisted in laying down, Sunday 
after Sunday, a regular course of systematic theology 
which was thoroughly antiquated, and were insisting 
that a man should believe it ' nolens, volensJ '"' 

I begged leave to remind him that the averas^e New 
England minister in the three or four leading denomina- 
tions, was a liberally educated man, who, in addition to 
his collegiate course, had also probably spent his three 
years in the study of Theological Science — a degree of 

47 



48 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

education not surpassed in any other profession in 
America. I quoted to him the remark of a leading 
publisher that, " but for the purchase of the works of 
Strauss, Paulus, Renan, and similar writers, by clergy- 
men who, denominationally, were wholely out of sym- 
pathy with such writers, thtse works could not be 
published in this country." These clergymen keep 
thoroughly abreast of theological thought, even when 
they regard it as erroneous. As for theological fact 
being old, it is in the same category as geologic fact and 
chemical fact, both of which have to do with very ancient 
things. No one reproaches chemistry because its law of 
chemical combination is so old, nor astronomy with the 
fact of its ancient stars. There are scientists who absurdly 
suppose that all the thinking of the world is done about 
their theories of science. The material advancement of 
the century pushes materialistic studies into prominence ; 
but, after all, the " proper study of mankind is man," to 
which the theologian adds : " and the study also of God."' 

" But," I said, " let us get at our work for to-day. 
You were to tell me what you do really believe, be it 
much or little, about religion ; so that I may know where 
to begin in my argument for Christianity." 

'•I fear I shall shock you,"' he said, after a few mo- 
ments' thought, " if I say, candidly, that I believe in a 
God and in an immortality of the human soul, and I am 
not certain that I believe anything else about religion. 
If I do, as you go on, I will freely concede it." 

" Is the God in whom you believe a personal God ? " 

" Why, yes ; I think so. Still, any idea of God is to 
me a little nebulous. I think of him as a sort of dilTused 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 49 

ether ; a kind of ever-present force, like gravity in the 
physical world. Only he must be in the world of 
mind as well as in the physical universe. He is thought 
— pure thought. The conception suits me that you 
religious people are using a good deal just now, when you 
talk of the immanence of God, his continuous presence 
in everything." 

I said : " Yes, but we are talking in religious circles 
also of the transcendence of God ; of God as over and 
above as well as in and through all things. It takes both 
ideas in combination, or you get no being great enough 
to call God."' 

He replied : " I suppose I must concede that in some 
sense or other God is a being as well as an influence. 
But I confess that I would like to hear what you have to 
say in behalf of the personality of God. I know very 
well Spencer's phrase, 'Unknowable Power,' and Mat- 
thew Arnold's ' power which makes for righteousness,' 
and similar designations, and they cover a good many 
things ; but I do not see why such writers ascribe thought 
and plan as well as power to him, and then refuse him 
his name of God. Frederick Harrison has pointed out, 
in a recent review, the fact of the unwillingness of Spen- 
cer and Huxly to say ' God ' squarely, instead of going 
all about the idea to find some new name. It seems to 
me that Spencer would have the God whose name he 
avoids, a being of power without thought. His God 
seems to be a stream of potency with a tendency to a 
good end. I would go as far the other way, and say that 
it is rather as pure Thought, than as pure Power, that 
he impresses me. But let me say again, that I would 

D 



•50 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

like to listen to an argument on the personality of 
God." 

Without directly replying, I asked him '' if he had ever 
thought of God as possessing a definite character." 

He looked up with some surprise. 

I said : " You concede for him power, and claim for 
him thought. Now, is there any moral quality in his 
nature? These attributes cannot be conceived of as un- 
swayed by some other quality. For a God only powerful 
would be frightful, and a God only or mainly wise miglit 
be more frightful still, in thwarting and circumventing 
us. Power and wisdom are terrible in such a being, 
apart from the character which determines their use. 
Such a being might be an infinite foe of all goodness. 
Something must rule these qualities, or they may make 
for anything but noble ends. That something is moral. 
Wise ends must be morally wise ends. Moral ends are 
in their nature regal and final ends. Matthew Arnold 
recognizes the idea that in the God, even in the impersonal 
God he so reluctantly admits, there is a trend toward the 
right. God is to him a stream of tendency that makes 
for righteousness. But it must be that the moral charac- 
ter of God is of far greater weight than the ' Power ' of 
whicli Spencer usually speaks, or than the 'Pure Thought' 
which you so applaud. Even Fiske, in his ' Cosmic 
Pliilosopliy,' says : ' God is, in his deepest sense, a moral 
being ; ' though he is ever arguing, notwithstanding his 
admission, for some sort of a * quasi physical' God, exactly 
as Spencer leans to a God who is ' Power ' rather than 
intelligence. Fichte insists that ' the active moral order 
is God.' Exactly what Fichte and Fiske mean, and 



THE PEESONALITY OF GOD. 51 

where they are to be classed, I need not inquire. I men- 
tion them in connection with Spencer, to show that they 
admit that the moral idea comes in and has a force. 
And I claim that, if it has any force, it is the chief factor ; 
it is the controlling idea ; because moral ideas are always 
of highest rank. They are regnant, because of their char- 
acter. The supreme thing cannot be power with Spencer, 
nor pure thought with those who reject Spencer's method, 
and yet come to his result of an impersonal God in some 
other way. He must not only be thought, but his thought 
must be moral ; not only must he have ends that he 
seeks which are wise, but they must be wisely moral ends." 

I added, after a moment : " Now, here is the argument 
for personality in God. It can even be argued solely 
from ' Power,' for all force is in mind." 

He interrupted me to say : " I well remember when 
and where I first learned the truth that force is origin- 
ated in mind alone. It was from Bowen's 'Lowell 
Lectures ; ' and it opened for me a new wide world of 
thinking. And yet, " he continued as if speaking to 
himself, " while I must admit that mind is always per- 
sonal so far as we know it, if I thought mainly of mere 
power — physical power, as does Spencer, or psychical 
power, as does Fiske, in getting at the idea of God — per- 
haps the impersonal conception would equally meet the 
case." 

'' Would it any better meet the case than the personal 
idea ? " 

" No ; I concede that your view would be at least as 
good." 

" But the consideration of mere power," I said, " is by 



52 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

no means the main thing. And even if it were such, 
the volidoD, the actual will of a personal God seems to 
me a far more simple and logical way of accounting for 
the exercise of power. One need go no farther than 
such a being with such a will." 

"And how would the doctrine of Evolution affect 
your argument ? " 

" In no way, whatsoever," I answered. " For Evolu- 
tion has reference solely to the mode in which a thing 
is done, and not at all to the power by which it is 
wrought. If the universe had been struck out by a sin- 
gle fiat of God, so as to stand just as we see it to-day, it 
would not have shown, so far as I can see, any more 
power than is shown by distributing the force through 
the past ages, beginning as a single germ. The latter 
method would seem to many to show more wisdom ; for 
it ex'hibits more laws in play. Greater skill in their use 
would appear to an onlooker, but not more power. 
Power, in its last analysis, resides in personality. But 
to you, who think so much more of God as thought, the 
argument for the divine personality ought to be espe- 
cially strong. Thinking, in a human mind, is judging of 
things as true or false. It rests on a conviction that 
there is a distinction between the true and the false. It 
recognizes the fact that there is such a thing as error ; 
and error is that which is measured by some standard, 
and it is error because it is not like the standard truth. 
There must, then, be some infinite mind to which all 
truth is ever present. There must be a judge to consti- 
tute an error. An ultimate intelligence must be the 
ground and measure of all our finite thought. We think 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 53 

toward the true, in that way gaining knowledge. And 
this grand faculty of knowing in us cannot be conceived 
of as the result of a force which is itself without the 
power of knowing. Thinking means a thinker. Furth- 
ermore ; if there be no thinking God, then an imper- 
sonal necessity binds us ; and, since we cannot, in that 
case, be other than we are, it is idle to tallc of * the true ' 
or ' the false ' as a thing having any worth or any worth- 
lessness. All such distinction departs. To say that a 
thing can be otherwise than it is, in the line of the true 
or false, is to say that there is another power outside the 
forces of nature which could have brought about a dif- 
ferent result, — which is the very thing the impersonal 
view denies. Atheism is interested in declaring against 
such an outside power. For it sees that the ' outside 
power ' may be God. While we, who hold that some 
mind thinks and plans, see in this outside working the 
personal force of a personal God. If thought be imper- 
sonal, in God and in man, then all ideas, and all plans 
and judgnients and opinions, are unavoidably what they 
are. And so they are all equally true, and so equally 
praiseworthy and equally commendable, — which is the 
same thing as saying that they are not true and praise- 
worthy and commendable at all. So that impersonal 
necessity is an absurdity. For we are made up, as men, 
in such a way as to believe in ' the true ' and ' the false,' 
and all our thinking rests on that innate conviction. 
And there must be a standard mind in which resides 
the perfect judgment of what is true and false. You, 

Mr. B , called God the ' pure thought,' which can 

only mean the perfect thinking of a perfect thinker. If 



54 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

human knowledge comes only from a person, shall the 
source and head and perfection of all intelligence be 
found in one who is less than a person ? " 

" There is a good deal in that view of the matter," he 
said, " of which I have not thought. I have been put- 
ting down notes here, on this slip of paper, so as to be 
able to think this thing through during the week, before 
our next interview. I am afraid I have been rather a 
believer in the impersonal God than in him as a person. 
Spencer's emphasis on power has led me in that direc- 
tion. If I might account for the universe of men, 
things, and laws on the impersonal theory, the moment I 
come up into the sphere of mind and thought I see the 
difficulty. I will admit this much, that the personal 
theory is simpler, more natural, and, it seems to me, 
more thoroughly adequate for meeting the case than the 
other." 

I said : "If theism meets the conditions of the problem 
equally well and is simpler and more natural, then it 
should be accepted. For the universe either has a pur- 
pose or it has not. Soulless material is not naturally 
thought of as having a purpose. A personal being 
akin, in kind of faculty, to man, but vastly superior in 
amount of faculty, is the conception to which there is, 
in human history, a constant tendency. Men will be- 
lieve in a personal God. If it is a kind of mental in- 
sanity, then so much the worse for the race, for then we 
are hopelessly at sea, in any line of conviction." 

" But all this," I continued, " is but the introduction 
to the more complete proof — the moral argument. You 
have not a doubt about the mental world as a reality — 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 55 

^. e., the world where the fundamental law is that of ' the 
true and the false.' Now have you any more doubt of 
the moral world — i. e., the world where the standard is 
' the right and the wrong ? ' Are you not fixed in the 
idea that, as God is ' pure thought,' as you called him, 
so he is also ' pure right ' — i. e., is God in the sphere of 
lightness, or, as we religious people more commonly call 
it, righteousness ? " 

He hesitated. He then said : " You are coming now 
into a realm of things that I have never emphasized. I 
have put the emphasis elsewhere." 

''Precisely," I added, " as Herbert Spencer has em- 
phasized ' Power ' in God, so you have emphasized 
' Thought,' in God. You think he should put at least 
equal stress on your conception ; and so I ask you now 
to put emphasis on this idea of the moral order of the 
universe, the moral character of God, in which we have 
the largest scope for proof, not only of God's existence, 
but of his personality." 

He started suddenly, and quickly and somewhat ex- 
citedly said : " Now I see where you are going in your 
argument. I see whereunto all this tends. When you 
asked me, a little while since, about my view of the char- 
acter of God, I was a little surprised, and thought you 
were getting away from the line you had proposed. But, 
I see you are like a lawyer, laying the foundation, in a 
series of cross-questions, for the evidence he is going by- 
and-by to produce. You are going to argue that the 
right can have a standard only in a personal God, as you 
did about ' the true ' in the mental realm ; and then, that 
a personal God, rather than an impersonal principle, 



56 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

would be likely to interfere in the history of the world, 
and to thrust in a new force ; that he would be likely to 
interfere with due process of law under w^hich men had 
done the wrong, by sending his Son, then miracles, then 
a revelation, then the whole religion of Christianity, as 
the legitimate outcome of a personal God who is set on 
rescuing men out of the grip of the wrong — in other 
words, you are going to argue your Christian scheme of 
things, and your Christian doctrine of ' salvation.' " 

" Precisely so," I said, " I concealed nothing. I have 
tried to get at what of truth you conceded about God, 
so as to get a common basis from which to start. What 
you conceded involved a good deal that you did not quite 
see ; simply because you had not thought it through. I 
had not the slightest idea of entrapping you. Which 
one of the conceded things do you want to take back ? 
We set out by your telling me what you believed ; and 
when I asked if the God in whom you believed was per- 
sonal or impersonal, you intimated that you were inclined 
to the latter idea, but that you desired to hear something 
in favor of God's personality, so as to confirm your 
wavering impression. I drew my argument from Spen- 
cer's favorite conception of pure power, aud then from 
your favorite idea of ' pure thought.' I want now to 
present the argument that God nuist be the Sovereign 
Right." 

"I beg pardon," he rejoined. " Go on." 

" There is less need of it, since you already see it, 

and see a good way beyond it, as to what the conclusion 

involves. For myself, living as a student of religion, in 

this moral sphere of things, asking about them * what is 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 67 

right/ these moral convictions are more familiar and 
more firm than any others I have.'' 

" I can see how it is so,"' he interrupted, " and what I 
meant to say is, that they are less familiar to me. I 
have cared more for the true." 

" And yet, Mr. B , you have by no means in social 

and business life, been oblivious of the right. You made a 
very sharp distinction along that line, in judging of men 
and their doings. You denounced slavery as wrong, in- 
temperance as a crime, and dishonesty as a wickedness. 
You had praise to give integrity, you applauded gener- 
osity, you were unstinted in your admiration of the 
heroes of the war. It is because in you, as in every 
man, there is a moral element, a sort of moral judgeship 
being conferred upon us all, as those ' made in the image 
of God.' And all this praise and blame would be im- 
possible to you if you were not a free, intelligent, moral, 
and separate person. On the impersonal principle, on 
the necessitarian scheme, you could do none of these 
things ; and no more could God recognize right and 
range himself on its side. Harriet Martineau says, 'I 
am a creature of necessity. I claim neither merit nor 
demerit.' Yet, she can blame those who do not take 
her view of things, and talk about ' morality,' when, on 
her system, morality or immorality can as little be as- 
serted of a man as of a mountain. You, Mr. B , 

though sceptical about a good many things, are a prac- 
tical man, and do not mean to run a theory into absurd- 
ity. You believe that right and wrong are realities, 
though men sometimes, because fallible, make a mistake 
about the particular thing which may be before them. 



58 



HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 



But there is a right and a wrong about a thing. And 
the fact that we are fallible about it just shows the need 
and the certainty of an infallible mind, the decisions of 
which are ultimate on all questions of ' the right.' God 
is right, whoever else is wrong. The ' moral sense ' in us 
all is a fact. If it were a fact that right were such 
outside of a personal God and by virtue of an imper- 
sonal principle, then there could be no sense of what 
ought to be, but only a sense of what is. It would come 
about that ' whatever is is right,' instead of whatever is 
ought to be right. No notions are more fixed than those 
expressed by the word ' ought,' when one says : ' I ought ' 
or ' I ought not ' to do that thing, ' to be or not to be 
that kind of a person.' A universe with wrong in it 
could not come into being any more than a universe with 
right in it, under the working of mere impersonal and 
unconscious forces. There must be somewhere, and 
so in some primal mind, the perfect sense of the right 
and the wrong, and for some wise reason, permission for 
the wrong to do its worst, so that the right may counter- 
work it. That final, supreme mind, having in it the ul- 
timate standard not only of ' the true ' but of "• the right,' 
must be a personal mind — a personal God." 

He said : " Yes, that is good logic if it takes in all the 
facts. But what if there are immoral facts all about us, 
for which the theory of a moral God does not account. 
Here is a sentence from Haeckel's ' History of Creation,' 
which I transcribed the other day to show you. He 
says: * If we contemplate the common life and mutual 
relations between plants and animals, (men included) we 
shall find the very opposite of that kindly and social life, 



THE PEESONALITY OF GOD. 59 

which the goodness of the Creator ought to have pre- 
pared for his creatures. We shall find the most embittered 
struggle of ' all against all.' He is showing that nature 
is not beneficent, and is arguing against the existence, 
or at least against the recognition of God." 

" I have this to say, that the facts, if they are so, are 
worse for his theory than mine. He would find all 
reason for creation and for orderly development in the 
' eternal immutable laws of nature,' as he calls them, and 
which he would make cover everything. Very well, 
then, either these ' immutable and eternal laws ' do, or 
do not include these disastrous facts of the * embittered 
struggle.' If they do not cover the facts, he has simply 
put some things outside the domain of his ' laws.' His 
theory is too narrow to account for them ; and the things 
outside his ' laws immutable, necessary and eternal,' are 
the things in which he must own some other force than 
law to be at work. He has thus made a place for the 
very God he denies, to work at least evil and mischief. 
He is as much obliged to account for these adverse 
things as I am. And he cannot do it on his theory. I 
can do it on mine. For these adverse things can be 
permitted — not under law; for wrong is the unlawful 
thing, since its unlawfulness makes it wrong. Sin is the 
unaccountable thing in a universe that is only under 
law. Sin is the violation of law — a thing impossible 
save as there is a free agent to do the sinning in a uni- 
verse over which presides a free moral being, who is 
supreme and so is a personal God." 

" But you are attempting to account for sin ! " 

" By no means," I said, " I am only showing that we 



60 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

can conceive of a free moral Governor of the universe, 
with free moral agents under him, as letting in sin, if he 
shall see a reason for it, in the results he is to gain 
thereby. I am showing that sin and righteousness, right 
and wrong, evil and good, cannot come in under a system 
of mere law, and that they can come in only through 
a vastly broad moral scheme of things which an Infinite 
Person may well be carrying on. I am not accounting 
for the sin in a sinner, nor for the cruelty in nature ; but 
only showing that none of this is possible under the im- 
personal idea, and that it can exist only in the realm of 
personality, and can be justified, if at all, under the sway 
of a Being who manages the evil so that on the whole 
the trend of things is toward good results. Even down 
on liis merely natural plane — to say nothing of the 
moral order of the universe — Haeckel would own tiiat 
his darling Evolution provides for the welfare of 
survivors in the ' embittered struggle ;' that the race 
of animals is benefited by the loss of those * uufittest 
to survive ; ' that the evolution of higher and more 
complete forms is constantly going on, and that a 
better progeny comes in to talve the place of that which 
goes out. Right in the narrower, he is certainly wrong 
in the broader view of the trend. Haeckel and Schopen- 
hauer are in the list of pessimists, but the mass of better 
thinkers are optimists, as are all believers in a personal 
God. Over against Haeckel let me quote Lotze. He 
asks : ' Is it possible to imagine a Being which, stimu- 
lated by the influence of every existing condition in the 
cosmic course, should with purposeless and blindly work- 
ing activity, impart to that course ameliorating impulses 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 61 

by which the thought-going dominion of what is good is 
established — a Being which cannot distinguish what is 
good in a good action from what is bad in a bad action, 
but yet acts as though it could do all this ? ' Matthew 
Arnold has to speak of a power 'that makes for right- 
eousness.' The conviction is certainly gaining ground 
among men that there is a moral goal toward which is 
the grand trend of things ; that the adverse facts are 
simply the narrow eddy near the shore which owes its 
existence to the superior tact that the great body of water 
in the channel, the real- river, is running down steadily 
toward the sea. As one of the proofs of a future life is 
found in the fact that the disorders of this life call for 
another to set them right, so the faults and flaws of the 
present scheme of things, permissible only by God, call 
for him to manage them in their outcome. So that, by 
the orderliness of all orderly things, and also by the 
apparent and limited disorders of the world, we are led 
to take refuge in the idea of a wise, free, moral Being, 
sovereign in the realm of right — a personal God." 

I had spoken these sentences slowly. He had jotted 
down " catch words " on his paper. When I ceased, he 
was silent a little time and then said : 

"I must think it all over. I had expected a very 
different argument from you on the existence of a God. 
I did not exactly doubt, but I was misty in my views. 
I think I did not fully take in the difference between the 
idea of a personal God and that of an impersonal God. 
The former view has clearly the better of the argument. 
It is at once a simpler and a vastly broader view. Where 
I said God in my former discussions, I certainly did not 



62 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

emphasize his personality, even if I meant anything more 
than a pervasive, impersonal principle. I am prepared 
to say the word God now with a firmness of tone I have 
never used before. But I see what is coming. You are 
going to press the argument that such a God, on the side 
of the right as against the wrong, has sent Jesus Christ, 
a supernatural person with supernatural miracles ; and 
then will follow atonement and regeneration, etc., all of 
them along that same line of intervention." 

I said : " It does not follow from the argument thus 
far, that he has done so. But only this, that the way is 
open for him to do that thing; that there is nothing, 
a priori, to show that he has not done so, and that he 
might be expected, as one who ' makes for righteousness ' 
to do so." 

Mr. B was weary. The hour had gone swiftly in 

the discussion of w^hich the above is only an outline. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL. 

CALLING on Mr. B at the appointed time, I was 
not surprised to see certain books on the library 
table. He referred to the fact, as soon as the usual 
friendly greeting and inquiries were exchanged. There 
was a copy of Mr. Fiske's " Cosmic Philosophy " and of 
his " Idea of God," a copy of Spencer's " Data of 
Ethics," and '• First Principles," also a wide-open review, 
containing an article in which copious extracts were 
made from the works of Haeckel. He said he had been 
trying to see for himself whether Spencer had put as 
much emphasis as I had represented him as doing upon 
the idea of God as a Power, at the expense of Thought ; 
also, whether Mr. Fiske, who uses far more frequently the 
word " God " than does Spencer, was really, as I had 
stated, to be classed among those who hold the word but 
drop out its meaning. He spoke of writers like those he 
had named as " authorities " on the matter. But I 
begged him to remember that these men he had quoted 
were hardly accepted as " authorities " on the theistic 
argument ; that geologists would not be willing to call a 
man, however eminent in other departments, an " au- 
thority " in their own departm'Bnt, nor should theolo- 
gians be expected to do it; that we had names of emi- 
nence such as Calderwood, in his " Philosophy of the In- 
finite," Janet, in his " Final Causes," among those abroad ; 

63 



64 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

■while Harris, in his " Philosophical Basis of Theism," 
Diman, in his " Theistic Argument," and Fisher, in his 
*' Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief," together 
with McCosh, in his " Intuitions," and Porter, in his 
" Moral Science," were men thoroughly at home on the 
theistic question, which is a part of the religion thev 
profess. He demurred a little, saying that those he had 
named were eminent men. To this 1 responded, owning 
their eminence in letters, but insisting that the profession 
of literature and that of religion were two things, and 
that eminence in the one did not make a man's opinions 
at all an " authority " in the other. I called his atten- 
tion to the fact that whereas a few years ago, so many 
purely literary men ignored religious inquiries, to-day 
the literary side of religion was deemed of such import- 
ance that the danger was lest literary writing should 
with some persons pass for religious ; that a man might 
be strong in the one line and a " light-weight " in the 
other, and that one would be sure to judge unwisely who 
put literary criticism in the place of moral and religious 
con\dction. 

I said that we must be about our work for the day. 
" You were," I continued, " to tell me what you believed 
about the human sonl." He said quickly, " Are you 
through with the argument for a personal God ? " " No ; 
but I can best present the additional argument by in- 
quiring about the soul of man which the Scriptures say 
is " made in the image of God," and therefore will be 
most likely to discover to us what God himself is in this 
matter of personality. If man is essentially a spirit, 
then, by the study of how he is made, we can surely tell 



THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL. 65 

something of God his maker, who is also a * spirit.' 
And therefore it is that I want you to tell me, whether 
you believe in a personal immortality for the soul of 
man." 

He answered by quoting the fifth stanza of Words- 
worth's " Ode on Immortality," laying especial emphasis 
on the lines — 

" The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 

Hath elsewhere had its setting, 

And comelh from afar: 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God who is our home," 

He said : " Wordsworth is called a Christian poet, but 
had he known the theory of Buddhism, he could hardly 
have put it into finer lines. The poem leaves the im- 
pression that the soul lived before, rose upon the surface 
of a life hardly personal, — as a bubble from the water 
floats on the surface of the river, — that, after a little, it 
is resolved back into the divine ocean of being whence 
it rose. Is not that a finely poetic thought, whether we 
accept its truthfulness or not ? " 

I said : " The Buddhistic conception is, to me, too horri- 
ble to be poetic. All conscious existence is not real, but 
only the bubble dancing on the wave, soon to vanish into 
nothingness, and the stream itself is to vanish also, and 
all sense and reason for the race of man is also to fall 
into nothingness and God himself to pass in the end into 
extinction. This is the saddest of all the creeds that 
the world ever saw. No, no. The human soul dowered 

E 



bb HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

at its creation with personal capacities, and which can 
forever set itself on the side of the good, which was res- 
cued, according to the Christian system, by the most 
amazing self-sacrifice on the part of God himself, which 
is able to enter into the divine plans and so to become a 
factor in God's eternal triumph over sin, and a participant 
in the heaven where goodness is to be eternally enthroned 
— this is a conception that fills the world with meaning 
and makes life grand and ' worth living,' a conception 
with such length and breadth and deptli and iieight, that 
it has inspired the song of the foremost singers of the 
world. No, I cannot accept Buddhism as having any- 
thing poetic in it ; even if some, with you, claim that 
the ' Ode on Immortality ' looks that way. But it is by 
no means necessary to so understand Wordsworth. In- 
deed, a score of passages in his ' Excursion ' look in just 
the opposite direction, and the mellow light of religion 
falls over all the pastoral scenes where he loves to lin- 
ger." 

He only said : " The whole matter of a soul is to me 
indefinite. I believe we have it ; but it seems more like 
an appendage that we shall carry when we go than like 
a part of ourselves. If you would go over the argu- 
ment for the existence of the soul, I should be at least 
more impressed with the fact, even if I did not believe 
it any more firmly than I do now." 

I said : " You are weary to-day. Let me do the most 
of the talking. I will put myself in the position of an 
inquirer. I will ask and I will answer my own inqui- 
ries. I will think out aloud, if you desire me so to do. 
Let me start where a sceptic would begin, as if doubtful 



THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL. 67 

about the existence of the human soul, and then proceed 
from point to point in the proof." 

" I would be delighted to have you do just that." 
" Well," I said, '• let me begin by asking myself this 
question. Have I a soul ? I know I have a body. I see 
it, feel it, and each of my five senses bears me witness 
that I have a body. But is there anything else about 
me, apart from the sensations of this bodily organization ? 
As I ponder this question of a soul, I find myself asking, 
what this is in me or of me, that is pondering the ques- 
tion, that is thinking about the matter ? What is this 
self that is asking self certain things ? What is this that 
cares, if indeed, I care about knowing ; and what is it 
that wants to know and will know, if I can only find ouc, 
whether I have a soul ? What is this ' I ' that thinks, 
reasons, is interested, has fears when I fear, has hopes 
when I hope, — what is it that does all these things ? At 
every point of my inquiry the ' I ' comes in. It is the ' I ' 
that is assumed, as well as the ' I ' that asks these ques- 
tions. This ' I ' thinks and feels and hopes and fears 
and reasons and judges and decides. I must have some 
name for what does all these things. Until I can get a 
better name for that part of me which does all this, let 
me call it ' soul.'* 

" But how do I know that this soul is not my body 
acting in another way ? Because this body of mine and 
this soul of mine have absolutely no one quality in com- 
mon. To the body belong such qualities as hardness and 
softness, as color and weight and form. To the soul be- 
long such unlike things as thought and feeling and 
memory and judgment and reason and conscience and 



68 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

will. Bj scales I can weigh the one : there are so many- 
ounces and pounds. Or, I can measure it ; there are so 
many pints and gallons of fluid. Not by ounces or 
pecks, not by colors or shapes, can I estimate thought. 
I cannot put conscience into pints, nor reason into cubic 
feet. There is no common standard of measurement. I 
find simply two parallel existences, but they are, so far 
as I can judge by the dilFering qualities that beloug to 
each, entirely unlike in essence and in kind. But it may 
be asked whether in some way that we cannot under- 
stand they may not be the same substance. If, indeed, 
there were any one factor common to both, the question 
would be pertinent. But in the absence of such a unit, 
it is absurd to attempt to found unity on dissimilarity 
and oneness on opposition. Then, too, why should one 
want to make them alike, when they are obviously and 
inherently diiferent? In that case, too, the appeal would 
be to the body itself, — and the ' I ' in me which thinks, 
does not respond to the sentiment that this ' I ' is the 
body. Or, if the appeal be to the soul, that does not say 
that the ' I ' is the body. As well try to make it out 
that all is soul, and the body a nonentity, as, that all is 
body and the soul a nonentity. Let me hold to both as 
ultimate facts. Body and soul are parallel and related 
facts, and are therefore not identical. Nor can thought 
be, as some have suggested, a secretion of the brain, as 
bile is of the liver. For bile from the liver can be cut 
into parts and put into scales, and can be weighed by 
physical weights, while thought refuses to go into the 
scales and cannot be reckoned by grains and penny- 
weights. You can put the bile into measuring glasses, heat 



THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL. 69 

it in a retort, and apply to it all physical tests for color 
and quantity and quality, but none of these things can 
you do with thought. Thought is sui generis. It will not 
subject itself to being estimated by scruples and drams 
and ounces. You are dealing with unlike things." 

He interrupted me to ask : " Are you as certain of the 
existence of the soul as of the body ? " 

'■' More so. For the qualities of the body are very few 
and very easily named. The list of those belonging to 
the soul is far longer. Then, too, the basis of knowl- 
edge concerning both body and mind is in the mind, 
rather than in the body. It is not the body that knows 
the mind, but the mind knows all that is known both of 
the body and the mind. It uses the physical organism 
when it would know, as a master uses a slave. And, 
further yet ; we are more certain of the knowing soul 
than of the known body. The ' I ' which is the soul, 
knows itself as knowing, in all it ever knows. There 
may be sometimes a mistake about material things, — we 
have found out afterward that au object was not what it 
seemed to be. But we were not deceived as to the fact 
of our thinking about it. The ' I ' that does the think- 
ing was there, even when we were mistaken about the 
thing we thought we saw. So that states of mind are the 
most certain of anything we know. And thus our cer- 
tainty of the existence of mind is greater than that we 
can ever have of the existence of matter, — even of the 
organized matter which makes up our bodies. 

" I am, in addition to this, conscious that this soul of 
mine is a reasoning soul. I am reasoning now. To reason 
is to ask for the truth, and it involves the idea of the 



70 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

absolute truth somewhere and in some one being. That 
being is God. My faculties of reasoning are personal. 
Another man has memory, reason and will ; but they are 
his, as mine are mine, as God's are God's. All such 
faculties cannot be a protoplasmic mass of general mind. 
They are personal faculties, individual qualities. They 
belong to separately organized existences ; to persons 
responsible before the grand ' mental law of the true 
and the false,' and who are in duty bound to know the 
truth if they can. If, as all agree, thinking involves a 
thinker, then the ' I ' is a real and personal being. And 
the man who thinks can only think on the mental plane, 
and under the mental law of ' the true and the false ; ' 
and every such exercise involves the idea of a standard 
mind in which the perception of the true is perfect. It 
follows that every act of thinking involves, consciously 
or unconsciously, the idea of another being who can also 
say ' I ' when speaking of himself. Every glance of eye 
or bending downward of the ear, and every word that 
trembles on the lip at the last analysis, is the inquiry 
for a cause ; and so, recognized or unrecognized, is an 
inquiry for the First Cause. We can see and feel and 
know that there is in the universe about us what has been 
called 'an intellectual order of things.' Things are adjusted 
to thought. They provoke it. We ask for the thought in 
the things. Things are correlated to the truth concerning 
them ; and these minds are made up so as to believe that 
there is, somehow, a true intellectual order in them — i. e., 
a reason for them, a purpose and plan in them. They 
are not 'fortuitous atoms' happening to be as they are. 
There are method and mind back of their order : there is 



THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOTTL. 71 

truth about them. But we men never maht a truth. Ic 
is true. It accords with a standard of truth that exists 
in some mind, for we never create truth. We make 
nothing true. We simply, by our mental powers, find it 
to be such. We accept the ready-made truth about 
things ; and we do our work intellectually, by recogniz- 
ing the facts as they are. In knowing this soul of mine 
to be a reasoning soul, I know it is at work in a world of 
thought to which, as I am correlated, so God must be 
correlated. He too must be, as I am, a personal thinker, 
working out his ends by personal thought and will." 

He interrupted me to say : " How then, do you make 
any place for mistake and error in reasoning ? " 

I answered : "' Do you admit that error is real? " 

"Certainly,'' he said. 

" But," I responded, " error can only be a fact if there 
is any absolute truth with which, as a standard it is com- 
pared and found not to agree. Now all human reason- 
ing being liable to error, while at the same time we feel 
that the knowing soul was made to know, there starts up 
instantly and inevitably the conviction that there must 
be somewhere a being free from mistake, whose knowl- 
edge is perfect. Perfect thought, which is the ideal of 
all thinking in a personal human soul, demands an 
actually perfect thinker in a personal God. So that 
human errors in thinking, as well as all fair and correct 
reasonings, demand one who can and does know all, and 
whose thought is pure thought. If, as some one has said, 
'there must be a judge to constitute an error,' then it is 
just as true that there must be a judge to constitute a 
truth. 



72 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

"But," I continued, "the moral argument for the 
personality, both of the soul and of God, is even stronger. 
Have I, in this soul of mine, not only a reasoning soul, 
but a moral soul ? Is there in me a moral sense as well 
as a reasoning faculty ? Is there in this soul of mine a 
consciousness of the ' law of the right and the wrong ' ? 
Do I ever, even in one case, draw the distinction between 
the two? In answering let me ask what this is in my 
soul that is always saying ' I ought' and 'I ouglit not.' 
My own volition does not create this law. I find it ex- 
isting. It seems to be a part of the scheme of things ; 
for I am always appealing to it in other men. I seem to 
be born into this system of the universe, exactly as my 
body is born into the system of physical facts and laws. 
I did not make the law of gravity in the physical realm, 
nor the law of the true in the intellectual realm ; no 
more do I make the law of ' the right and the wrong ' in 
the moral realm. I have faculties by which I recognize 
and use these things and laws, in these unlike but parallel 
realms. Moreover, this moral realm has a kind of 
supremacy. For there may be a question of ' the right ' 
in the using of my hand and foot and eye and ear. So 
that moral uses are the grandest uses, and moral ends 
ultimate ends, for this soul of mine. 

" Now all, except one small class of infidel pessimistic 
thinkers, own, some gladly, some reluctantly, that there 
is a ' moral order in the universe.' Even Mr. Spencer, 
the apostle of ' Power,' admits as Arnold does, that there 
is a ' power that makes for righteousness.' It is an 
admission, as his critics have declared a himdred times, he 
should not have made on his system. It is all that saves 



THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL. 73 

him from blank pessimism. So far as I know, the boldest 
scepticism leaves the human conscience, the ' sense of the 
right and the wrong,' an undisputed fact. Sceptics may 
weaken it by divorcing it from God ; they may account 
for it by heredity or by whatsoever other theory they may 
select, — one of them about as good, or rather about as 
bad as the other. But there the fact stands. The ' I ' 
when I say ' I ought ' is a personal soul acting in the 
presence of moral law and under the pressure of the 
highest kind of responsibility. 

" It is obvious at a glance, that the theory of a per- 
sonal God who is perfect judge in the domain of right 
agrees best with this moral order of things. Further, 
that tiie sense of right, or ' righteousness,' as a principle 
in the soul, is best supported by the conception of a per- 
sonal God, — an eternally Holy One. The idea gets to 
have tremendous weight, the conviction an overmaster- 
ing power, when a man really takes it into his soul. 
This idea of a Holy God on the side of right, and who is 
the foe evermore of ' the wrong,' is the grandest possi- 
ble aid to one who would be helped in righteousness. 
And further yet ; this idea of a personal God, a very 
sovereign in righteousness, is correlated with all those 
moral ends which thoughtful men find in the world. 
There is a moral meaning — or else there is something 
appalling in the constitution of things. It is this horri- 
ble shudder which has kept so many men from atheism. 
It is a healthful shudder. It is nature's own recoil. We 
come back to our own souls and call up again the con- 
viction that right is real ; that this soul is moral, and is 
related to the moral realm of things ; the very constitu- 



74 HOUES WITH A SC]:PTIC. 

tion of the soul requiring a personal and righteous 
God." 

He said : " I think that must be so. But 1 never 
gave that idea of the moral sense in the soul much 
force before. I see I ought to have done it." " There ! " 
he added, instantly, " I have used your word ' I ought,' 
and I have made it also my own." 

He continued, after a moment's pause : " I have one 
objection to your argument about a moral purpose ; and 
it comes with a good deal of force to a sick man like my- 
self. Last night I pondered it in this wise. I thought 
that if there was really a good God why did he allow 
me to suffer so ? " He looked up pitifully, and I could 
hardly restrain my tears. " Life seems to me here, con- 
fined to this room, and never, as they say, to go out of 
my house again, — life and health also are surely good 
things ; and a good God could so easily give them to me 
now if he would."' 

I could not reply for a few moments. We both sat in 
silence. At length I said : " My dear sir, I feel too well 
the force of your objection. It comes home to every 
sufferer. It comes up to some minds at every spectacle 
of sorrow. I admit its force. But what if it were 
proved that there was no God and no moral trend of 
things ? Would that be an alleviation to you ? " 

" Oh no," he said, " that would make hopelessness now 
and hereafter to be the lot of man. It is hard enough as 
it is without that." He checked himself, and then 
added as if he was surprised at what he hud said : " I 
am not talking much like the sceptic and infidel that 
some people think I am. I have been wont to talk 



THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL. 75 

against all ideas of God and religion. But in the light 
of my recent thinking, I feel a recoil against a universe 
without some head, without a God. For perhaps he 
can account for these facts so sad and terrible, if we can- 
not." 

I could not repress some astonishment at his words, so 
unlike any he had previously employed. I said : " You 
heard my admission just now, that there are things which 
at first view do not seem, when taken all alone, to be 
kindly and beneficent. They appear to be, if not cruel, 
at least blind and unfeeling. But we must remember 
that they are parts of a whole system. The motion of a 
wheel in a piece of mechanism may be the very oppo- 
site of that which, as a whole, the machine exhibits — 
the backward motion best contributing to the forward 
result. To your eye only on its backward motion the 
piston-rod in the locomotive would seem to work in 
the wrong way. Your eye on the forward motion 
would see only the antagonism of the backward mo- 
tion, and the result would be nil. But by the crank 
connection and its attachment to the moving wheels, 
both motions contribute equally to the speed of the en- 
gine. When you see both the general result and the 
forward motion of the piston, you can well believe that 
the skilled mechanic has to do with devising the back- 
ward motion, and uses it in some wise way in his mas- 
terpiece. 

" Further, it is a discipline to have to do our moral 
work amid some moral difiaculties. As in the depart- 
ment of the mental world, it trains the intellect to 
search out the truth, because there is error, so in the 



76 HOUKS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

moral world there is enough to discipline us in what is 
dark and strange. We must learn to believe and tinist 

where we cannot fully see. What, my dear Mr. B , 

if this very sickness has in it a wise purpose? Surely 
you are beginning to see some things in new lights, and 
this is a kind of moral compensation for these hours of 
lonely suffering." 

He said : " You have not yet gotten to the idea of the 
immortality of the soul." But I saw that while his 
mind was singularly keen, and he had followed closely 
my argument, physical weariness had come to him. I 
said : " The soul's immortality " shall be our next theme 
of discussion. And I took my leave. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE soul's immortality. 

EVIDENTLY Mr. B was not so strong as at my 
former visit ; but he had, as he said, anticipated 
my coming, for he remarked that our last interview was 
fresh in his mind, and had given him food for thought 
during the week just ending. 

"I am curious to know in what shape you are going to 
put the argument for the immortality of the soul," he 
said. 

" Let me begin where I left off," I replied. " I had 
been following out my question, ' have I a soul ? ' I had 
shown that every quality of that part of man that thinks 
and feels and loves and hates and judges of ' the true ' 
and feels obligated by ' the right,' is exactly unlike those 
qualities which belong to the body ; that this soul which 
does these things is a part of us of which we are more 
sure than we are of the body ; is of higher rank ; is a 
reasoning soul doing its intellectual work on the plane 
of things where ' the true ' is the fundamental law — a law 
we do not make, but find made for us when we come into 
being ; a law that makes necessary a standard mind in 
which reside omniscience and just reason, and this mind 
is God. All mind of which we know anything is per- 
sonal, eacli quality in it being the attribute of an indi- 
vidual. And the correlative truth of personality in man 
is personality in God." 

77 



78 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

I said also "that I had argued, likewise, that the soul 
was a moral soul — was under the law of ' the right and 
the wrong;' that there were no deeper convictions than 
these moral ones, even though men by no means always 
obeyed them ; that these personal convictions were in 
turn correlated to a ' moral order of things ' in the uni- 
verse about us, and to the personal moral God who was 
sovereign in the realm of righteousness." 

He interrupted me to say : " You know that I have 
put stress hitherto upon the idea of the soul as tliought 
and upon God as pure thought. Your argument con- 
vinced me at the time, that thought demands for its cause 
a personal thinker, and that the ultimate thinker is a 
personal God. But the moral argument did not, at our 
last interview, impress me so strongly, and yet as I have 
thought it over, it has had more and more weight with 
me. It is getting," he added, after a moment, "it is 
getting to seem a very serious thing for a man to be in 
this moral realm with a personal God who is the perfect 
judge of the right." 

I said : " My argument for the soul's immortality 
shall be along this last line of thought which you have 
suggested. I will ask myself the question : ' Is this soul 
of mine — this reasoning soul — this moral soul of mine, — 
also an immortal soul ? ' The chief reason is indeed the 
moral reason ; but other reasons for believing in an 
immortal soul might be given. It would be possible to 
urge — (1) The fact that the soul, superior to the body in 
kind, ought to exist after the body is gone. By almost 
incredible labor, one great builder projected and con- 
structed the pyramid of Cheops, which has endured 



79 

thousands of years and will last perhaps while the world 
may stand. Is the maker's existence limited to the three 
score and ten years he spent on earth ? Is his merely 
material work greater than himself — the thing he made 
greater than its maker ? It is so unless the soul lives 
after death ? (2) This soul of mine lives now. It is 
reasonable to believe that it will continue to live on until 
something is encountered superior to itself that will 
destroy it. Death cannot do it ; since we experience, in 
the destruction and renewal of our bodies during our life- 
time, changes vastly greater than death, and those 
changes do not destroy the soul. (3) The present state 
of the soul seems to be only the beginning in a course of 
knowledge. We see the flowers of the field going on 
unto perfection, \yhere they have gained it, and there 
is nothing more for the flower to be or to do, it perishes. 
When shall this soul of mine find that limit, so that its 
perfection is gained beyond which it has nothing more 
to know or to be or to do ? When is further development 
impossible for this mind ? Never. Never do you and I 
reach tiiat place. We are going, then, you and I, as 
thinking persons, right on into this eternity, nor do we as 
separate souls cease at the remotest period to think and 
feel and know. It will be incessant duration, not of 
abstract existence, but of conscious thought and of the 
conscious tninker." 

As I looked up, I saw that his eyes were fixed intently 
on me ; and yet he seemed not to see me, but to be look- 
ing on beyond me. After a moment, he said : 

" That is an overpowering reflection. There is no 
getting out of the sphere of thought." 



80 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

"But," I continued, "these three things just named, 
while their trend is direct, do not mean so much to me 
as does the argument from our moral being and moral 
position and moral responsibility. We are in an unend- 
ing moral system of things, and we are made indispensa- 
ble factors in it. Given a conscience, and an act in view 
of it, and its relations are the widest conceivable. That 
moral act runs up Godward, and God exercises upon it 
his moral nature, and he judges of it as right or as wrong. 
It is a factor in the final account which all just thinking 
declares a necessity at the end of human probation on 
earth. It may influence, as an act, other men. The 
influence of some single acts goes over whole generations, 
and its moral good or harm can only be computed in the 
last great day of human existence on earth. Shall the 
soul's doings last longer than the soul's self? In written 
human history we can trace an act of good or of ill done 
by a man in high position, through a thousand years. 
Nay, there was an act done in Eden, far back by the 
headwaters of human history, that has not only shaped 
the course, but colored every drop of the flowing stream 
of our humanity. But the unwritten history of every 
human soul has its acts that afiect the personal life of 
both self and others, moulding it and making it what it 
is in all the future of the soul's existence. And with 
reference to one's own moral action, the results can never 
be felt at the moment of acting. The soul is itself made 
stronger in the right or stronger in the wrong. And this 
strength or weakness in the right shows itself in the 
next action, and then in the next and so on evermore. 
Find a place where the process shall terminate, if you 



THE soul's immortality. 81 

can. Each moral act demands a result in the next 
moment. It requires then that next moment in which 
to get that result. If a part of the penalty of my sinning 
is greater disposition to sin, there must be a next moment 
in which that disposition to sin shall work itself out. 
Penalty demands not only a punishment, but a future 
time for the punishment. The moral act of to-day demands 
a to-morrow in which its consequences shall have room. 
The to-day of my moral life demands the to-morrow of 
eternity for its issuing result. Moral action once started 
is immortal in results and so carries with it as a necessity 
the immortality of the moral actor. And therefore we 
believe in the immortality of God and in the immortality 
of man. They are eternally moral actors in an uuend- 
ing moral universe ! " 

He appeared a good deal impressed with these consid- 
erations. I had spoken slowly with frequent pauses. He 
had taken quite full notes. And now we were sitting 
there a few moments in silence. 

At length he said : " I cannot reply to your argument ; 
but it is a pretty bad case for a man wbo has ever done 
wrong." 

"But," I replied, -'just here comes into view another 
question. It is this : What may an Eternal God be con- 
sidered as likely to do for these immortal souls, who are, 
so many of them, utterly out of the way, and who have 
all of them done wrong? It seems to me that when I 
see the evils of the world for which, not God, but man is 
responsible, I can only ask whether this kindly God has 
come to us men with any moral intervention. I claim 
the probability — the immense probability — of moral in- 

F 



ea HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

tervention; the probability that he will, if it can be 
done, thrust in somewhere and somehow a new force — a 
power that shall intervene ; a new agency, possibly a 
new agent. The great moral law, of results from good 
and from ill doing, must still have its place and play. 
But God may have something to introduce at the fit 
moment that shall start human history in a new cycle, 
and a human soul that has done wrong in a new career 
of doing right. I claim that all men must feel that this 
intervention was not only possible but probable ; that 
hence have come the thousand attempts at religion — 
composite attempts in which the better reason has called 
for moral relief and the evil passion in men has called 
for debasing rites and doctrines. So that every religion 
in the world, with one exception, has over against its 
downward an upward tendency — the outlook and long- 
ing for intervention. Moral intervention is the cry of 
man's mistakes, as well as the prayer of his religions. I 

feel the need of it. And you, Mr. B , in your words 

just now — al)out ' a man who has done wrong being in 
a hard ca^e ' — you feel it as well. Here we are with 
signs of moral disorder all about us, in what is ideally a 
universe of moral order. Sin is in us and error all 
about us, and every man in danger of being eternally 
involved in his own sins and mistakes. Surely there is 
need of God's moral intervention. And this means a 
supernatural intervention — a supernatural Saviour, a 
supernatural gospel for man's rescue and mental and 
moral salvation. It is the immense probability that God 
would come to the moral rescue of these morally immor- 
tal souls that I want you to consider. The proof that 



THE soul's immortality. 83 

he has actually done it we may take up in our next in- 
terview. But everything is to be considered from the 
moral standpoint, the point of the religion of the Bible 
as a moral intervention. It is not a merely intellectual 
question at any point of the inquiry. Moral ends are to 
be intellectually considered, and everything in and about 
the religion of the Bible is to be judged of in the light 
of the fact that we are morally immortal, and are in a 
systetn of things wherein this idea is never for a mo- 
ment to be out of view. Such a God, himself a spirit, 
doing his moral work in the closest possible connection 
with each man, who is also in turn a spirit, and both ot 
them existing forever, and in moral touch with each 
other, is the thought I want to leave with you now." 

I said : " We have gotten on far enough to warrant one 
thing. I would like to ask, before I go, of this God, of 
whom and in whose presence we have been talking, that 
he will help us both to see the truth about these things. 
It is only fair to do this. If a very superior intelligence 
from the other world were here, or even a very superior 
man were present, we would ask his aid in our investiga- 
tions. I propose that our future interviews should con- 
clude with prayer. 

He sat silent. There was a displeased look on his face. 
It passed in a few moments. He then said : " I have no 
objection that you should pray." I asked God's blessing 
in a few words. He urged me not to fail in calling the 
next week, and I took mv leave of him. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. 

MR. B was so eager to begin our conversation at 
the next call, that he could hardly wait to answer 
my inquiries about his health. He said, quite abruptly : 
" I don't see why God needed to have a son." 
At the first moment it was not quite evident to me why 
he made so singular a remark. But presently the con- 
nection in his mind occurred to me. He was evidently 
conceding the need and the fact of intervention, but not 
ready to admit, without some mental objection, that this 
had been done by Jesus Christ as Son of God. While I 
was getting at his mental position as indicated by his 
question, he repeated the words in a tone almost of irrita- 
tion : 

" I don't see why God needed to have a son." 
I replied by asking, " if it was necessary for us to be 
told of all the reasons that influenced God before he 
should act in any matter ? Was God obliged to consult 
you or me or any other being, angelic, demoniac, or 
human, and sauare his doings with the ideas of any of 
his creatures in such a case ? " 

" Oh, no ; I suppose not, so far as be himself is con- 
cerned," he said ; " but still it is a fair question w^hether 
we could not get on without that thing if indeed it be a 
fact, i have been asking myself if the illumination of 
a man's own faculties would not be enough without any 
84 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. 85 

of this moral machinery. Perhaps," he added, " I have 
a little Quaker blood in my veins, and I have always 
thought that, if there were a God, his relation might, 
as the Quakers say, be ' borne in upon the soul ' by way 
of personal illumination to every man who lives." 

He smiled as he spoke, and it was clear to me that he 
was less expressing his belief than raising an objection to 
what he saw he would probably be obliged to admit. 

I asked him " if he would claim that this enlighten- 
ment comes to every man by virtue of his natural spiritual 
faculties, or does it come by a special divine visitation ? " 

He said : " What have you to urge against the view 
that this illumination comes to all men by natural en- 
dowment? " 

•' I would only say what you have said repeatedly in 
these interviews — viz., that man's most unfortunate things 
are his religions. And that, if this view is correct, we 
have in man's religions that which is always and every- 
where true, no matter how absurd, no matter how con- 
tradictory, no matter how heathenish and abominable. 
These ' terrible religions ' are all the result of ' natural 
enlightenment.' If these are the light, what must the 
darkness be? A man who has his own little private 
revelation is now called a ' crank ; ' or, if a very high 
religious official, we call him a ' Pope.' What a ridicu- 
lously variant thing this spiritual faculty in man appears 
to be. It lets men down to grovel in every form of 
error from the Fetichism which makes a god of a bit of 
stone to the other extreme ot Pantheism which, by mak- 
ing everything a god, leaves us no God at all. This 
* spiritual faculty in man ' so much lauded as to exclude, 



86 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

for some the need of any other help, has allowed and 
required the worship of sun, moon and stars, Grecian 
statue, and huge Patagonian idol, the embodiment of 
all ugliness. It leads men to differ on every religious 
doctrine that can be named, and to differ diametrically. 
It is, certainly, judging from its fruits, about the most 
depraved thing in us. As you get it everywhere among 
men, it is man's most useless endowment considered as 
his sufficient guide. We Christians claim the faculty to 
be a failure as a guide, but a success as a capacity — a 
capacity to be laid hold of and rectified — and thereby 
only to be made noble and useful. It needs outside 
intervention, and then it no more exists as a mere want, 
but as a manly faculty divinely restored to pristine place 
and power. It is a part of us that has met with a mishap. 
It is a magnet that has lost its polarity. It is a mechan- 
ism that is disabled and liable to work exactly contrary 
to the original intention. It is a disordered faculty and 
works as often mischief as good. It is a watch, made to 
keep time indeed, but as often wrong as right. On a 
jeweler's frame, one may see hanging dozens of these 
watches. The express use of a watch is to keep correct 
time. But no two of these dozens of watches keep the 
same time, though they are all at work at the problem 
of timekeeping. Not one of them keeps standard time, 
though it keeps ticking as if it did. They are all, how- 
ever, intended as pieces of mechanism, to measure rightly 
the hours ; but each one of them must be repaired, then 
wound, then regulated, then set by standard time. These 
watches need the watchmaker's hand. They are not 
going to be perfect watches through any accident, nor to 



THE DIVINE INTEEVENTION. 87 

develop into such, in some other ^eon.' They are in 
need of an outside interference. As they hang there in 
the jeweler's frame, about all you can say concerning 
these professed 'time-keepers' is that they have a capacity, 
through their mechanism, for keeping time, and can be 
repaired, duly wound, regulated and set ; and when that 
is done their confusing diversity which makes it well- 
nigh impossible that any of them should ever be right, 
will have ceased. Yes ; ' our moral spiritual faculties,' 
made to guide us, as a watch is made to keep time, have 
started out on their own course, and the consequences 
are most deplorable. With these results, what is this 
' natural illumination of every man ' worth as a sovereign 
guide in religion ? Every man must have it, according 
to the theory, for it is his natural endowment ; and it is 
responsible for all man's aberrations. If man isunfallen, 
as some say, what is this faculty worth ? If he has fallen, 
then the result is what we see in man's horrible ' illu- 
sions.' The answer to your question about this ' illumina- 
tion of nature as enough,' is just your own arraignment, 
so often made, man's religions." 

" Yes," he said, " I admit it all. You meet me on my 
own ground. I will go farther than you in denouncing 
the absurdity and even the wickedness of man's religious 
systems. All the talk about ' worshiping truly and 
sincerely toward whatever name one may use, be it 
Brahma, Pan or Lord,' is maudlin, as if most of man's 
religions had not been among his worst crimes! I am 
almost ready to call the men who talk in this way aiders 
and abettors of criminality. As for trying to find good 
in these criminal religions, it seemed to me like trying to 



88 HOUKS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

* extract sunbeams from cucumbers.' I think, in view of 
the results, that we must give up the theory of a natural 
illumination. But what have you to say about the 
other theory — viz., that God's Holy Spirit illuminates 
every man ? " 

"Simply this," I replied, "that all which has been 
urged against the other view is equally valid against this 
idea of supernatural illumination for every member of 
the race. But you must remember that this view admits 
a supernatural intervention. Some one comes to men 
personally on this theory. And the consideration of it, 
only for a moment, shows that those who adopt it allow 
the possibility of intervention in addition to our natural 
faculties in some way. Indeed, we Christians accept the 
fact of an illumination, which you called a ' Quaker 
doctrine.' We believe that God's Holy Spirit, in con- 
nection with the gospel of our Lord, is especially given 
to some of the race. It is one kind of intervention, de- 
pending upon what, we think, is the intervention which 
covers all forms of special manifestation to men. How^- 
ever, light is by no means man's chief need. For all 
men know better than they do. Truth is needed, but 
there is needed an authoritative truth teller. There 
would seem to be call not only for divine wisdom to in- 
terfere in the ' one way,' but to give to men the ' One 
Name.' " 

He hastened to remark, "Well, if we must have an 
intervention — and, I think, there is call for one — why are 
we shut up to this particular one of Christ's religion ? " 

I said : "' Would you seriously think of considering for 
one moment any other religion ? You must recall the 



THE DIVI>'E INTEKVENTION. 89 

thing in which we agreed, in an earlier conversation 
that no other religion proposes to do anything for men. 
It is this, or it is no religion, with an intervention." He 
did not reply, and so I continued : " Try and imagine 
one better than Christianity ; one that is able to meet 
more completely the case as it is now opening before us." 

He spoke slowly, but he said at length : " I think I 
should put the interference with the bad course of things 
at the outset of history. Somehow the bad effect of sin 
got in. And if we accept the biblical Adam and Eve 
account of it, then why not have had the good fact start 
also at that point? Why not have God's Son — if we 
accept the Christian's claims for him — appear as the Re- 
storer, and start a development in the race that should 
be an oflset at the very beginning of things; so that a 
principle of right moral development should work itself 
out along the whole course of man's history on earth? 
I think I could the easier accept it as a development." 

" Thank you," I hastened to reply. " You have de- 
scribed just the thing that has been done, with only one 
necessary historic variation. The normal fact was put 
into the course of development at the first instant after 
the abnormal fact of sin. The primal promise came hard 
after the primal transgression ; the good leaven instantly 
went into the mass. As soon as evil began to work, it 
began to be checkmated by a new element divinely 
thrust into human history. Of course, you could not 
have it historically true that Jesus should be born of the 
Virgin Mary in the garden of Eden. But the first ciiild 
was doubtless hailed by the first pair as the one in whom 
the promise of intervention was to be fulfilled. But it was 



90 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

not that one of ' the seed of the woman' who was to do it. 
The historic incarnation of the idea could, as now we see 
it, better come farther on in human history ; but the idea 
of intervention worked itself in, and from that hour began 
a development which culminated only when the ripest 
hour of the world's history allowed the predicted Christ 
to be humanly born. The Eden idea was of One to come 
who should ' braise the serpent's ' head that had ' bitten 
the heel,' and so hindered man's holy walking. The ger- 
minal idea gradually unfolded. It developed through 
Abel's sacrificial altar, through the family worship of the 
patriarchal period. It came out in the ' ladder ' and the 
* wrestling angel,' and in the predictions of the dying 
Jacob. All the ' youthful world's gray fathers ' had it as 
the one article of their simple but comprehensive creed. 
It penetrated all the beliefs of the old nations, each of 
which bears traces of the original faith in the one God. 
It was a springing seed from the racial traditions come 
down from Eden. It was a lingering echo of a far-off 
time. It was a reappearance of the truth which God 
would not allow to be altogether lost. It was an especial 
heritage of the line of men which was the ancestral line 
of the Hebrew nation. Then came the one only ritual 
God ever ordained — the Mosaic ; a ritual that developed 
immensely ihe conception ; a ritual that furnished the 
relig-ious nomenclature for all these Christian centuries ; 
a ritual that in every rite was a prophetic object lesson. 
Each great seer or singer, historian or philosopher, 
broadens the conception among the chosen race. And at 
length a nation, most receptive of moral ideas of any in 
those olden times, have it for their one great hope that the 



THE DIVINE INTEBVENTION. 91 

Messiah will soon appear. And in certain directions the 
heathen nations of those ages helped on the ripening of 
the world's hour as well. They contributed, not in any 
voluntariness, but providentially, to the result. Their 
failures in religion were an education as to the need of 
a special intervention from on high. Their mistakes 
were overruled, and became an element that worked into 
the plan ; so that when the ' fullness of times ' was come, 
and the Christ should appear, he was the ' Desire of all 
nations.' It was through four thousand slowly moving 
years, the development of the good over against the 
development of the bad. And at the first available 
moment, the historical Christ appeared in the place of 
the prophetic, and the Christ idea of Eden was incar- 
nated in Jesus of Kazareth. Had he come a single gen- 
eration sooner, his work, humanly speaking, must have 
been a failure. The sending of the Christ was at the 
earliest practicable moment, as now we see it. The ages 
of moral evolution from the germinal idea prepared the 
way for the historic revelation of Christ." 

He only said, '' I see that you claim the advantages 
both of development and of sudden historic manifesta- 
tion, for Christianity." 

I proposed that the argument from prophecy should 
come in later, and that the plan of discussion I had out- 
lined should be followed. 

I said : " We have seen the need of something outside 
of man to help him, and have seen also that man's chief 
capacity was that of trust in something beyond his own 
personal knowledge in any department of inquiry. And 
now the next step in the argument is this, viz., to ask 



92 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

whether this power frora without must not be that of a 
person. I called your attention," I said, " to that which 
is meant when we ascribe personality to God ; that he is no 
vague essence, like the intangible ether which our scien- 
tists hold must be diffused through the interstellar spaces, 
but a personal being, with a mind, a soul, a will ; that he 
is a moral actor. And we saw too, what is meant by 
saying that man is a personal being, and not a mere 
bubble on the surface of the sea of mental and moral 
protoplasmic existence. He is a distinct, moral and 
responsible actor amid moral facts and forces. The 
point I now urge is that the rescue of man must, in the 
same way, come through a person. Sin is not an abstrac- 
tion ; it can only be committed by a person. The one 
against whom it is committed is also a person. The one 
committing sin is the sinner, who starts a moral force in 
a wrong direction, which goes on repeating itself. When 
once a sin is committed it is beyond the sinner's power 
to arrest this active force. No repentance can do it. No 
reformation can do it. The mischief goes right on, in 
spite of all protest. The tears of the contrite spendthrift 
do not restore the wasted fortune. The regrets of the 
penitent son whose misdeeds sent a father broken hearted 
to an untimely grave, do not restore that father's life, 
much less do they cancel the sin against God. Whoever 
else is sinned against, God is always the one against 
whom the offense is greatest. Even if he be forgotten by 
the evil-doer, the sin is not lessened, but increased. Why 
should a man forget the God to whom he is bound every 
moment by obligations far stronger than all that can 
possibly elsewhere bind him ? The way of hindering the 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. 93 

penal results — if indeed there be any way — will come 
most likely through a person. The restoration to right 
relations — and every human soul in its best moments 
feels the need of restoration — will be through a restorer. 
Plato, looking mainly on the intellectual side, said that 
our chief need was a divine Man coming down from 
heaven. Somehow in spite of all deflection by wrong- 
doing, the most constant traditions of the human race 
have looked on to the appearance of a phenomenal person. 
Both Tacitus and Suetonius, as you will recall in the 
well-known passages, speak of the world-wide expectation, 
nourished by the entire trend of prophetic teaching, that 
' empire would pass into the hands of men coming from 
Judea.' Rescue from waning and unsteady and uncer- 
tain superstitions would come through persons — or as the 
Jews, foremost in moral ideas among the Orientals, held — 
through a person whom they called by various names, 
chiefly by the name of ' the Christ ' or * the Messiah.' 
But all these hopes of humanity gathered about the idea 
of personality. Mere truth, while needed, would not 
suffice. It must be truth competently enforced by a 
person who could be trusted. As all great moral move- 
ments had had personal leadership and had been success- 
ful mainly through expenditure of personal force, so it 
must be here. As of Mahomet and Zoroaster, who put 
personality into their reform, so here there must be a 
personal agent. "When God shall send deliverance it 
will be through a Man of men. One of the names Jesus 
claimed for himself was that of ' Son of man.' The ideal 
of all humanity had received birth in one human being. 
He showed what man, as man, and apart from sin, 



94 HOUKS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

actually was ; and hence that name, so peculiar, so sig- 
nificant, the ' Son of Man.' Other good men grew good 
by degrees. They worked their way upward by treading 
on their baser selves. They gradually lifted their souls 
out of their native defects, and after a while grew more 
or less good. It was a long process of rectification from 
their faults. But no such process is observed in Jesus. 
He grows as out of himself. He is like an ever-expanding 
flower. His is a unique religion, in this respect, that it 
has for him no penitence about its beginning, no con- 
fession and reformation as to its way of progress. He is 
evidently ' from above,' as he claimed. He comes ' down 
from heaven.' The impression he makes is uniike that 
of any other person who has ever lived. He has no 
self-seeking. He has a consecrated life, which is not 
ascetic. He is separate from sinners, yet one with men 
at their marriages and their funerals. In his day thou- 
sands hollowed out their cells in the arid limestone hills 
of eastern Judea and spent life in devotion. But he 
retired from the world only for a few days ; and for the 
most part he walked in close contact with men in their 
daily business. In hundreds of positions we find him ; 
but always his robe is stainless. His utterances are 
simple. His nearer meaning is plain. But his eyes have 
the far-ofi* gaze as well ; and his words look on through 
the centuries. His utterances are not highly wrought 
productions suggesting toilsome processes of thought. 
His words do not smell of the lamp ; they come easily, 
naturally, spontaneously. He is not mystical, yet has 
the air of one who has a divine instinct. He sees all 
things in moral connections. They are related to the 



THE DIVIXE INTERVENTION. 95 

great invisible, but most real, moral universe that takes 
in God and souls. He sees men in the broadest relations. 
No one ever thought so much of man ; but it is of man 
as related to God. He is a dogmatist, rather than a 
logician. He stands amid the greatest truths about time 
and eternity ; about God and the soul, with a certain 
firmness of foot. He knows easily where he is. He 
speaks wich an authoritative tone, and yet with a lofty 
humility before his father God, as one on a mission 
from him. His reserve in deed and word is almost as 
wonderful as his disclosures ; his silences almost as elo- 
quent as his utterances. You feel that you have not 
seen all of him. You would like to trust him far more 
farther on. He never blunders because of hasty words 
or immature thought. He never hesitates and struggles 
toward what he would express. He is in an atmosphere 
unclouded. He is not only good and wise, but he sug- 
gests an ideal of goodness and wisdom. He has a wholly 
different air, both as man and teacher, from any other 
person who has ever moved men. He draws as out of 
himself. He immensely impresses the man who studies 
him. He is not formed on any Greek ideal. He is not 
cast in any Egyptian mould. He is not even a Hebrew 
ideal of the misdirected thought of his day. He is 
morally a cosmopolitan. His light is not chromatic in 
tone ; it is the blended colors that give us in him the 
purest white. Men have tried their practiced hand at 
depicting the ideally perfect man ; but every attempt, 
though made by the hands of Plato, is a confessed failure. 
The model man cannot be invented, but he is recognized, 
by the foremost moral teachers, as Jesus Christ," 



yb HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

Mr. B interrupted me to say: " I admit that the 

ideal of all goodness is iu the Christian conception of 
Christ. But the farther point is this : Can the conception 
now held of him by men be historically verified ? I 
admit that when you say of a course of conduct that it 
is ' Christian,' or of an act or mood of mind that it is 

* Christ like,' you are giving it the highest praise ; but 
whether this ideal comes from the New Testament is 
another question." 

I answered : '' Somewhere Christians got this idea of 
their Christ. If they originated it, they deserve a vast 
amount of credit. There would seem to be a great deal 
of force in Rousseau's remark about the inventor of such 
a character as a greater man than his hero, if that were 
possible. The Christians of all centuries have had these 
gospel portraitures of Jesus. Of course, they come to a 
better understanding of his character as they study the 
ideal as found in the books of the religion we call 

* Christianity.' And the character had to exist before 
the Gospels could be made. It was impossible that these 
Gospels, written so soon after the events recorded, so soon 
after the person whose life they depict had lived, should 
be the invention of that time. The world, in no section 
of it, had any such ideal of a great character. And the 
subsequent ages had not. We know from the Apocry- 
phal Gospels what sort of a hero that age and those im- 
mediately succeeding it Avould have depicted. We know 
from the myths that grew up a few centuries after these 
writings were made, what the 'mythical theory' so-called 
would have given us for a Christ. We- see the curious 
caricatures of goodness that the ' myths ' of succeeding 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. 97 

centuries have put about the historic facts of the lives of 
saints and martyrs. The human botchworiv shows in an 
instant. But the unique life of Christ stood out. The 
ideal, which it has taken nearly nineteen hundred years 
to ai:>preciate in some good degree, is not a creation of 
our century. There it is, in the Christian documents, 
written in the century that saw the facts. How about 
this wonderful correspondence of our highest moral ideals 
with those of the four Gospels ? Here is a person depicted 
very carefully by plain men, who could not have invented 
the idea, much less executed it ; doing this in an age mo- 
notonously secular and unbelieving ; writing it out in 
simple narratives, in which the person they describe is in 
all sorts of positions, and never failing in one of them ; 
putting this ideal before the world as actual, living for 
him they called their Master, and dying for him, getting 
these facts before the world of Roman and Grecian 
thought in the very age when this Jesus lived, and some- 
how getting the world of thinking men to believe intel- 
lectually in this model of all righteousness ; and doing 
all this in the clearest-cut century the world has seen ! 
In some way sceptics are bound to account for all this. 
It will not do to reject the obvious conclusion, except on 
some full, fair theory which shall explain how all this 
came about. Immediately after Jesus lived, a few per- 
sons had this ideal character before them, holding that a 
certain person had lived it out. The ideal of those hun- 
dreds is precisely the ideal of these millions now. They 
quoted the same deeds and words that we do now. He 
w^as the same Lord and Christ who had lived and died 
and risen, as he is now. The patchwork of ' scattered 



98 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

moral ideas of a person sinless ' cannot have been gath- 
ered from the men of his time. They did not have this 
conception before he appeared. The next generation had 
done worse at painting or at retouching the portrait. 
Farther on, there would have been still greater departure 
from any worthy idea. The subsequent ages of ' myths ' 
— myths, it must be remembered, are of slow growth — 
in which incidents might be invented, would have been 
wider yet in their departure. Fraud and tradition in 
the recasting of the story were tried on outside gospels, 
and the curious botchwork is the literary marvel of anti- 
quarians. Myth-makers and poets, taking liberties with 
facts, exist to-day as in all centuries. And they have 
made use of a basis of fact in such poems and fables, even 
when representing English or American history. But, 
on the other hand, in all these centuries within the line 
of ' credible history,' which runs back before Christ's 
time, there have been reliable historians and careful an- 
nalists, whose works are preserved. In the ' Homer ' and 
in ' Virgil,' which you and I read in our school days, 
there were various readings exactly as in the Greek of 
the New Testament, and we know just how little they in- 
terfere with an accurate understanding of an author. 
The grand ideal of all manhood and the actual historic 
Christ are not only in agreement, but all Christians claim 
that they have taken this ideal from the New Testament. 
If they have not, whence did they get it ? It is an abso- 
lutely unanswerable problem for the sceptic. It admits 
of only one solution, and that is a very easy one for the 
Christian. The agreement of the ideal and the historical 
shows the source of the former to be the latter. And 



THE DIVJXE I-NTERVENTIOX. 99 

no thinking man has any idea that the New Testament 
conception of a Christ is ever to be superseded. There is 
perfection in the ideal, perfection in the record of tha 
New Testament, and perfection in the agreement of the 
two." 

He asked : " What would you say — allowing now that 
the ideal of all goodness and the New Testament Christ 
are one — what would you say to the Tubingen school, 
once so nearly dead, but now revived again, which inti- 
mates that Jesus ' got his doctrine by gathering and fus- 
ing into one all the ideas of his time ' ? " 

"Simply this," <vas my reply; " tbat the ideas of his 
time on doctrine were at the lowest ebb. It was an age 
in which intellectual siiarpness had outrun moral con- 
viction ; and it was anything but an original time any- 
where, in the realm of great moral ideas. The best ideas 
culled from the world's literature would have presented a 
most misshapen system, and a character founded on them 
would have been something monstrous. The Koman idea 
was that of material force as the means of universal 
empire; the very opposite of the kingdom set up by 
Christ. The Greek idea was that of elegant letters, a 
culture that should be given the few wise men, while the 
mass of the people were the ' laoi ' — i. e., the common herd, 
incapable alike of learning or religion. But Christ had 
no select philosophic set to whom ' the wisdom ' could 
alone be communicated. His system sought not 'the 
survival of the fittest,' which is morally the doctrine of 
the crudest selfishness, but the preservation of the un- 
fittest, the salvation of the lost. He is no Pharisee, 
discoursing on outwardness in conduct or correctness in 



100 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

rite. He is no Sadducee, crediting as little in religion 
as is possible. No more can we imagine him as getting 
any shred of his teaching from the Essenes of his day, 
the hermit sect, whose interest in doctrine was small, if 
only they might be left to a kind of devoutness that cared 
as little for truth as for practical and godly living. Nor 
was he a Hebrew, broader minded than his neighbors, 
who had opened a hospitable door to world-wide teaching 
from whatsoever source. He makes no impression as of 
a deeply read scholar whose mind has mastered the lore 
of the centuries. He is no Egyptian mystic, nor Judean 
anchorite. He is not at all the monk on the one hand, 
nor the shrewd philosopher on the other. He is just, in 
his doctrine and his life, Jesus of Nazareth. He is not 
a great reasoner, like Paul his apostle. He has not the 
logic of Roman law, as has Paul in the Epistles, when 
seeking a logical basis for Christianity. Paul reasons on 
the facts and teachings of his Master. His Master says : 
* / am the truth' Paul is great, but his greatness has its 
boundary. He is never source of his own truth, as was 
Jesus. We cannot account for Jesus as we can for Paul. 
We can see Paul in the making. Not so with Jesus. 
Jesus fulfills the Hebrew ideals as they stand on the 
pages of the Jewish sacred literature ; but of the Hebrew 
interpretation of the ideal in Christ's day, so variant 
from that of the Scriptures, there is not a trace. The 
one answer to the Tubingen school is that the Hebrews 
of his day rejected him for his doctrine at quiet Naza- 
reth, at bustling Capernaum, and at sacerdotal Jerusalem ; 
that Christ's doctrine was ' a strange thing ' when his 
apostle preached it at Athens, and that when he preached 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. 101 

it at Rome ' no man stood by him.' As in character so 
in doctrine, Jesus Christ is unique. He is his own doc- 
trine, claiming for himself what no other person ever 
claimed. The historic and the ideal Christ are one." 

I paused to give my friend the opportunity to reply. 
He did not speak. So I continued : 

" On this last point I want to say a word or two more. 
To claim perfectness in personal character for a man in our 
race, in such a world as this, means a good deal. Here 
is a man who morally escapes all the limitations of local 
environment, and of his own moral age, and of his par- 
entage and tuition. He is born of a mother belonging 
to this erring race of ours. She is a good, but by no 
means a perfect woman. The inheritance of human 
frailty and of innate sinful tendency is in her. The taint 
is in her blood. But her sin has nothing in her child. 
Here is a phenomenon — a perfect being, coming by way 
of natural birth into a sinning race, and yet he is an 
unsinning being, both as a child and man. The smirch 
on us all does not soil him. Is it not plain that we can- 
not have in this race of ours an unsinning man, unless 
he be also more than a man ? Only as a second nature 
shall lift him up above all the inherited infirmities of 
his first nature can you have in Jesus a perfect soul." 

He said : " Why, that means the divinity of Clirist. I 
had expected you to bring that in somewhere after you 
had shown him — if you could — the miracle-worker ; but 
you are urging it as a necessity of his perfect humanity." 

"Certainly I am," I said ; "for how can Jesus escape 
the sin of the human race, the limitation of his time, and 
the narrowness of his environment in any other way? 



102 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

You know how some would do it. They would claim for 
his mother sinlessness. But that only pushes the difficulty 
one step farther back. She sinless, her mother must have 
been so, on any natural theory of accounting for a sinless 
Christ. No ; the New Testament solution is the only one. 
Nobody would seriously plead that this second nature 
should be angelic or superangelic. Nothing meets the 
need of an interference but a true man ; and this true 
man born into our race, w^hile a man, must be more than 
a man. We want one to stand up and say in the audience 
of the wide world ' I am the Truth,' ' I came down from 
heaven.' We want one who can lay claim to being the 
' Only Begotten Son ; ' one who can be described as 'the 
Word who was God,' and also as the ' Word made flesh.' To 
say that God could not incarnate himself in humanity is 
to assume for ourselves omniscience, and at the same time 
deny him to be God. But if he has done this, then there 
is no trouble any longer about certainty in religion. We 
can be sure where we stand in our religious beliefs. Tiien 
he can demand faith from us for his utterances. We 
need such a Christ, an inhabitant of the eternities, to 
come out of them and tell us of the reality of that other 
shore. We are going out on a wide ocean, as all our 
departed friends are gone. We lose sight of them as they 
sail away over that sea. They send no message back. 
If they did, could we trust the messenger telling us any- 
thing of eternity ? No one of our friends has the infinite 
eye that measures eternity. Our dead are finite souls. They 
do not know of the interminable future. They might make 
some mistake. If the lips of the returning Lazarus had 
not been sealed, if the son of the widow of Nain had 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. 103 

spoken, the utterances might not have been altogether 
trustworthy. A finite soul thus going out and coming 
back, might have fallen into au ambush of evil on the 
other side. Only Divinity can know of himself of the 
enduring duration, and what it holds for us. His eye 
alone rests upon its whole breadth. I am not now pressing 
the fact of the soul as needing, this side of death, a spirit- 
ual salvation, and so as needing such a Saviour as the 
one depicted in the New Testament. That wider view 
comes farther on in the argument. Now the reasoning is 
that for intellectual salvation from errors that affect 
character and conduct, we need the perfect Son of God, 
so that we can have one who is human and yet divinely 
trustworthy. The longest, grandest part of your existence 
and mine is to be spent in that eternity, and we ought to 
know enough about it to get ready to go into it." 

He interrupted me to say, " Don't you think a man 
should do right simply and only because it is the right ? " 

" Exactly so," I answered. " But the wise is a part of 
the right. It can never be wise in practical life to have 
no care for the future. It can never be right to shut off 
self from one's neighbor, self from one's God, self to-day 
from all care about self for to-morrow. The right in 
smallest things is profoundly affected by the considera- 
tion of the God above us and the eternity before us. 
And if in smaller how much more in larger things. 
Some duties are almost created by the facts about God 
and eternity. It is another sort of life a man ought to 
live in view of these facts if these things are so. ' The 
right' in any case is the relation you and I sustain to cer- 
tain facts. Change the facts, and the right as toward 



104 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

them changes also. If God has actually * sent his only- 
begotten Son ' into the world, then you and I have a cer- 
tain duty with relation to that fact. Your life and mine 
has no right to be the same that it would be apart from 
that sending of him for us ' that we might have everlast- 
ing life.' The moral world, the world in which 'the right 
and the wrong ' are the fundamental law, is another kind 
of place, and another set of duties spring up instantly, 
in the presence of such a wonderful intervention from 
heaven.'"' 

He said, " Yes ; if Christianity is true, we certainly 
have to do the rio^ht things toward it." 

"And it is not to do the right thing," I said, "if Chris- 
tianity is true, for us not to let in on our present lives 
whatsoever of light it may bring us from the life beyond. 
There is a profound impression even outside of Christian- 
ity of an unending future existence. Men feel that as 
what we do to-day affects our to-morrow, so ail that we 
do in the to-day of our mortal life affects the to-morrow 
of our immortality. No wise man waits until to-morrow 
before he does to-day's work. But, on the contrary, every 
to-day's work is affected by what he knows ot its result 
on to-morrow's welfare. We need a Christ to tell us 
specifically about that eternal to-morrow, so that we can 
do our duty toward it in to-day's life. If there is a holy 
moral state in companionship with God and those in 
sympathy with him, and it is possible to obtain it by any- 
thing we do in this life, we want to know it; we are spe- 
cially bound to know it ; we have a duty laid on us to 
know it. And we need the teaching, authoritative and 
positive, of such a person as Jesus Christ, to know of that 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. 105 

heaven and the way to it. When we begin to think along 
moral lines, we soon come to feel that our immortality 
cannot be a blank, bold, characterless and colorless thing. 
It has for us moral quality as well as moral quantity. 
This is the very line on which Christ's teachings are 
peculiar. His disclosures of the future are never for the 
gratification of curious minds. He uses the light of that 
future by letting it fall on common duties. His revela- 
tions of the other world are grandly incidental. They 
come out in connection with practical daily living. The 
things to be done to-day, and in this life, are urged by 
promises about ' the last day ' and the ' eternal life.' 
These revelations are helpful to men who stand, as you 
and I stand, in the presence of that other world. You 
are a sick man and I a well man. Yet I may be nearer 
that world than you. We both are near enough to be 
personally concerned in getting all the help possible for 
secuiing the best there is for us when we go on the inevi- 
table journey." 

He was a good deal moved. After a few moments he 
said: "I have thought always of Christianity as some- 
how against us in its exactions and its professed dis- 
closures." 

"And there you have misjudged it. It is all /or man. 
It is God's help for us. It offers to do something of ad- 
vantage for us. It is not bad news, but ' good news.' It 
gives us each a personal, everliving Christ to go with us 
in life and through death, and personally to guide us 
through the disclosures of the eternal world. We need 
such a Christ." 

I told him that some years ago, when a boy, on going 



106 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

on a railway train into a certain city at midnight, I was 
a good deal concerned about my destination. The part 
of the city to which I was to go was utterly unknown to 
me. I only knew that the way was through a very dark 
and dangerous part of it. But just before the train 
rolled into the station, a man tapped me on the shoulder 
•whom I knew very well. He was a man to be trusted. 
I told him of my trouble. He said he knew the very 
building I wanted to find. I took his arm at the station, 
and all fear departed. He led me on through streets I 
had never seen. We turned this way and that. I was 
lost if he had left me, but I was safe with him. And he 
took me all through the winding way, and did not leave 
me till he saw me safely landed at the house I sought.'' 

He was visibly affected. He only said: "I think I 
understand you." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE DIVINE INTERVENTION REALIZED. 

MR. B was ready for me, and in answer to my 
inquiries about bis bealtb, said tbat be was 
stronger tban at my last call, but tbat the disease bad by 
no means been checked, and tbat be could not be un- 
aware that it was making progress toward a fatal termi- 
nation. He was very eager to take up our theme. He 
himself resumed the conversation by saying : " We were 
on the matter of the soul as a moral and immortal 
agent, and as such, in need of an intervention of some 
sort." 

He had before him bis edition of Browning, and he 
wanted to read to me a part of "Cieon," the heathen 
writer, who answers a philosophical letter of Protus, the 
king. Protus had lamented that be and all others must 
inevitably die — the only possible exception being men 
like Cleon, whose works in art and literature are to " live 
on when he is dead." And Protus wants Cleon to tell 
him whether that is not, to the painter, poet and author, 
a comforting thought wherewith to extract from death its 
pang. Cleon thinks it is just the other way — that a ripe 
soul loses all the more by death. He says the only alle- 
viation would be personal immortality in which the im- 
mense receptivity of joy in great human souls could find 
satisfaction. Reason does not teach this immortality, nor 
does Zeus, who would gladly intervene by positive teach- 

107 



108 HOUJRS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

ing, if there were such a future sure for mortals. Brown- 
ing makes Cleon say : 

"I, I, the man who loved life so overmuch 
Shall sleep in my urn. It is so horrible, 
I dare at times to imagine to my need 
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
Unlimited in capability 
For joy, as this is in desire for joy — 
To seek which, the joy— hunger forces us : 
That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait 
On purpose to make prized the life at large- 
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death. 
We burst there, as the worm into the fly. 
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But, no 1 
Zeus has not yet revealed it. And, alas, 
He must have done so, were it possible." 

I said : " No, Zeus has not revealed it. But we Chris- 
tians claim that Jesus Christ has brought life and immor- 
tality to light in his gospel. He is the intervention we 
need, and to the question of the reality of this interven- 
tion or revelation, we are to give ourselves to-day. We 
were talking of the immense probability that God would 
make some special intervention or revelation." 

He stopped me to inquire, if, by the word " revelation," 
I did not mean the Bible. I explained to him that the 
Bible is considered by us less as a revelation and more 
as an authorized record or history of revelations ; and 
that these revelations culminated, so we Christians be- 
lieved, in Jesus Christ. And that, theref)re, the words 
" revelation " and " intervention " expressed substantially 
the same idea, the latter being more specific, and refer- 
ing to the act of God in sending his Sou. 

He interrupted my further explanation by saying: "I 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION REALIZED. 109 

Yf^ant to ask how you would reconcile any intervention 
upon an established order of things, with the perfect plan 
of an infiuiiely wise God ? " 

"A fair question," I replied, "especially in view of 
the popular doctrine of evolution. A part of the perfec- 
tion of any plan is the provision for contingencies ; the 
outlook upon the emergencies sure to rise in its actual 
working out in order of time. A general foresees the 
battle and provides ambulances and surgical appliances. 
In that provision consists one part of his wisdom. The 
system of Christian intervention claims origin back ' be- 
fore the world began.' It has been the steady develop- 
ment of a divine thought. But the culminating mani- 
festation of what was steadily unfolding m human 
history, came in the introduction of the gospel dispensa- 
tion — a primal thought as a conception, but a new thing 
as an intervention, historically considered. These two 
ways of looking upon the Christian system are by no 
means antagonistic. Given a wise God and a sovereign 
God ; and for him not to have foreseen our moral need, 
nor to have foreseen human bewilderment in this matter 
of religions, nor to have foreseen the moral involution of 
sin and error that was to enwrap and derange and so put 
in peril each of these immortal souls, and for him not to 
have ready at the moment the historical revelation of his 
gospel — that would have been unwisdom indeed. A wise 
scheme is always as perfect in its timeliness as it is in its 
compass, its methods, and its agencies." 

I added : " Your question, for which I thank you, has 
opened a line of proof. And I want to say the whole ar- 
gument takes in a vast number of points. Indeed, the 



110 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

moral argument is one that increases in force with the 
study of long years. For there comes to be a growing 
sense of the moral fitness, not of one and another single 
thing, but of each part as related to the other, and of 
each to the great moral end sought by the system. And 
this becomes more and more evidential. Only this is to 
be noted that this gospel of interposition must not be 
judged in any portion of it apart from the great objects 
sought by it. No part stands alone, nor even unconnected 
with the end always in view, viz., the rescue of men from 
error and sin and sorrow. It is the moral fitness of the 
scheme to accomplish that end which we want to keep in 
mind ; the moral fitness of a given miracle to the general 
end of the system itself — if we shall find miracles in it 
anywhere. It is the fitness of the miracle to the teaching 
inseparable from it ; and the fitness of them both to the 
character and objects of the miracle worker and the 
miracle teacher, and the fitness of part to part, and of 
all with the end of the system, that constitutes the moral 
argument which I am trying to present. It is the moral 
fitness of Christianity as a whole broad scheme that I 
want you to consider — its fitness not only in itself, part 
to part, but to man in his dignity as an immortal, to him 
as one who has gone wrong morally and needs to come to 
be right again ; to him as related to God and capable of 
entering into God's highest moral plan of working; to 
him as potentially a sou of the Father ; to him as capa- 
ble of having a revelation made to him from God's 
mind and heart, by which comes not only rescue, but the 
highest conceivable fello\vship with God." 

He evidently understood what I had just said. For 



THE DIVI>'E INTERVE^'TION EEALIZED. Ill 

he looked up in a new and wondering way, as much as 
to ask why I was saying just those things. 

I continued : " You must excuse me. You thought I 
was going to work to prove the historical truthfulness of 
the Bible ; to show that the miracles, especially those of 
the New Testament, were actually wrought, and on this 
basis of authority that I was going to demand your faith 
in the Scriptures." 

" Yes," he said, " that is just what I expected you 
to do." 

" With minds of a certain mood, I certainly should 
offer to do that thing. For that is the logical method. 
Through all the ages, and the world around, and for the 
mass of mankind, there is a demand for authority in 
religion. There is — and rightfully — an expectation of 
the miracle as a sign and seal, the true and natural 
voucher for the authenticity of a new religion, or a new 
dispensation of an old one. In respect to this demand, 
it is the same for the rude and for the cultured. The 
demand that the Bible shall contain miracles as creden- 
tials is exactly as scrong in this as in any former century 
— with this difference only, that now we recognize a 
moral end in a miracle, and a fixed era. The class of 
minds demanding miracles for authenticating a new 
religion is by no means inferior. Some of the most logical 
and intellectual men, especially those who are legally 
trained, require this outward and historic evidence. And 
God has so made them up that nothing less or other than 
these external evidences showing that Christianity is a 
religion founded on facts, will satisfy them. To these 
men, the absence of miracles from the Bible would be the 



112 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

most damaging of all possible things. But, Mr. B , 

your mind works in another way. You do not care so 
much about an authentic fact as about a consistent and 
proven truth." 

He very courteously responded : '• You do me honor."' 
" Yes," I replied, " I do, in one way. You are specu- 
lative in your mood. The general fitness of a scheme 
of things to secure a given result, secures your interest, 
and forms for you the best proof. To you, the key that 
fits the intricate wards of the safe-lock, so that all the 
* tumblers ' fall into place, is the key made by the 
maker of the lock. 1 want to show you that the key fits. 
"There is among those who profess the religion 
called ' Christianity ' a })retty tolerable agreement as to 
what this religion really is. It is held to set forth sub- 
stantially these facts — viz : That God has sent into this 
world his Son to be man's Teacher to save him from 
his religious error, man's Saviour to save him from his 
sins, man's Guide to conduct his steps heavenward. This 
supernatural person was the only begotten ' Son of God,' 
and also the perfectly human ' Son of man ; ' and his 
unique life and words and deeds, his death and resurrec- 
tion and ascension, are all included in ' Christianity.' 
With these Christian facts are naturally and inevitably 
connected a series of doctrines which Christ taught, such 
as man's need and doom as a sinner, such as the atoning 
death, such as the Holy Spirit's influence on human 
hearts, persuading men to live worthily as before these 
facts. And with these facts and doctrines there are 
found also, a series of promises, including the regenera- 
tion of the soul, a resurrection at the last day for the 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION EEA.LIZED. 113 

body, and life eternal for those who so believe in these 
facts as to give them controlling power over the heart 
and the life.'' After a moment I added : " I think this 
is a fair statement of what may be called the ' creed of 
Christendom.' " 

He replied : " For these facts you are dependent upon 
the Bible, and about its trustworthiness you have not yet 
submitted your argument." 

''Nor need I, for the object now had in view. I am 
trying to get a good working definition of Christianity, 
as it is held by the great mass of those who for all these 
centuries have professed it as a religion. The Christian 
facts all existed before the New Testament record of 
them was written. There is in the world a religion 
named ' Christianity.' No matter, for my present point, 
about the especial record of it. If we wanted to be very 
definite as to a specific thing done by Jesus Cnrist, or a 
specific word he said, we should go to the Bible, after 
proviug it authentic. But my argument does not require 
this at present. I want to get at this religion in its 
claims and its generally acknowledged facts, exactly as 
I should want to get you to define the politics of the 
political party in our land called the ' Republican Party.' 
I think we could agree pretty well as to its principles 
and aims and history. We could then discuss it as a 
political movement, having a definite character and 
exerting a positive influence upon the nation. So, too, 
it would be with the Liberal party in English politics, or 
the Socialistic movement in Germany. It would be true, 
indeed, that if we wanted to discuss any minute sentence 
in the political creed of Republicanism, we should have 

H 



114 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

to go to the documents in which the ' platform ' of the 
party is laid down ; or, if we wanted to know any special 
historic fact, we should consult some trustworthy his- 
torian on the times in which the event was said to have 
occurred. So here ; if we were discussing some miracle, 
— say the feeding of the five thousand, the raising of 
Lazarus, or the resurrection of our Lord — we should be 
obliged to go to the documentary evidence for the specific 
fact ; and that would take in the question of the trust- 
worthiness of the gospel histories. But I am now getting 
at the ' creed of Christianity ' as it stands before the world, 
and I have given a fair statement of the religion which 
goes under that name. Of course, as in a political party, 
there are men who emphasize one feature of the common 
belief more than another ; some who would even deny 
a particular doctrine which others feel to be essential to 
the comjDleteness of the scheme. But the great consensus 
of the belief of those calling themselves Christians is 
what I have in view ; and in this way of judging, the 
facts and documents I have named may be called the 
fundamentals of this religion. Now, it seems tome that 
the most conspicuous thing about this religion is that it 
is an intervention. It professes explicitly to be such. 
And I want to urge that nothing less or other than an 
intervention can meet the demand. The need of some- 
thing from without to come into the existing order of 
things is a very obvious fact." 

I had brought with me a slip containing a recent 
utterance of Mr. Huxley, and begged Mr. B 's per- 
mission to read it. It was as follows : 

" I know no study which is so unutterably saddening 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION REALIZED. 115 

as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set forth in 
the annals of history. Out of the darkness of the pre- 
historic ages, man emerges with the marks of his lowly 
origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelli- 
gent than the other brutes; a blind prey to impulses 
which as often as not lead him to destruction ; a victim 
to endless illusions which make his mental existence a 
terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren 
toil and battle. He retains a degree of physical comfort 
and develops a more or less workable theory of life in 
such favorable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia 
and of Egypt, and then for thousands of years struggles 
with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness^ 
bloodshed and misery, to maintain himself at this point 
against the greed as well as the ambition of his fellow 
men." 

" That sounds a good deal,'"' said Mr. B , " like an 

old-fashioned orthodox sermon on total depravity." 

I said : " After some little acquaintance with theolog- 
ical writings, I must say that it remained for Mr. Huxley 
to describe man's moral position as one of 'infinite 
wickedness ; ' a statement unparalleled in the most Cal- 
vinistic divines. I might quote others, not at all religious 
men, whose concessions of man's wretchedness if not as 
startling, are as positive. If ever there was need of inter- 
vention it is for a being in such a moral position. There 
must be some way out of this terrible state of things, or 
all human history in time to come will be the same sad 
record. For, as Huxley says in the same connection ; 
* He ' — man — ' exactly repeats the process. And the best 
men of the best epochs are simply those who make the 



116 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins/ ' Fewest 
sins.' Then the moral wrongs, the 'sins' of men, are 
owned as cause and outcome. And that is just what we 
Christian thinkers claim — viz., that sin is in the race ; a 
development, in itself, of hopelessness. Even man's 
religions are, to use Huxley's words, ' endless illusions/ 
The intervention must be moral as well as intellectual, 
clearing away illusions indeed, but at the same time lift- 
ing human nature out of this acknowledged depravity- 
The darkening of the intellect may leave the soul still 
fairly right. But the soul wrong, and on the subject of 
religion, the intellectual mistakes may well be described 
by Mr. Huxley as ' endless illusions.' We have seen in 
a former conversation, that moral ends are main ends, 
and ' the law of the right and wrong ' is the law of laws. 
By disobeying it we have brought upon ourselves im- 
mense damage. No other of all the laws of the universe is, 
so far as we know, great enough to have wrought out all 
this havoc as shown in human history. Under that law 
acting on wrong-doers, the only possible development is 
advance in wrong-doing ; unless, indeed, there is the 
thrusting in of a new potency. Surely there is need enough 
of rescue from this profound bondage of humanity to sin. 
For nothing can explain the trouble in which the race 
finds itself but the fact of sin. Coleridge was wont to say 
that though sin was a mystery, yet it was the one mystery 
which explained ten thousand other mysteries. It looks 
as though there were an actual lock requiring an actual 
key ; as if, in the gospel intervention, some one who had 
seen the need, had provided the supply. The proposed 
religion has studied the problem of man, and taken into 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTION REALIZED. 117 

account the great moral fact of human sin, so damaging 
in its results on the human race." 

" It has always seemed to me," he said, " that one of 
the things man needed saving from is his religions." 

'' Granted," I said ; " for they are his religions, and 
without exception they are developments rather than 
interventions; and in that one fact they differ, by the 
whole diameter of human thought, from God's religion. 
The fact, however, to be noted is this, that they all own 
sin. It is an open question whether or not the most of 
these religions are not, in part, attempts at a separation 
from the true God rather than at drawing nearer to him. 
There fire strong evidences that the original religion was 
that of the one God. So that the religions of the race 
are, in part, expressions of need, and so far they are the 
voice of nature in the human soul. But they are alsu the 
expression of corruptions, and of declensions from an 
original faith. It is when thinking of this latter aspect 
of them that you voice the sentiment of thousands when 
you say, as you did just now, that ' man needs to be saved 
from his religions.' " 

I waited for a moment to see if Mr. B had any 

objection to offer. He had none, and I proceeded : 

" There is another thing to be considered. It is not 
only that we men have needs, but that we are formed 
with capacity to receive and use this intervention. Eight 
over against the merely naturalistic doctrine of Huxley 
of * infinite wickedness ' is another doctrine which the 
hopelessness of mere naturalism cannot furnish us, but 
which we Christians claim as the perfectibility of human 
nature." 



118 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

He looked up with very evident surprise, as much as 
to say, " what do you mean ? " 

I said : '' Let me explain. We hold that the sin in 
human nature now is not essential to the existence of 
human nature. Our race has capacity for sinlessness. It 
was sinless once in Eden. It will be sinless again in 
heaven. It is sinful now through catastrophe. It can get 
the sin taken out of it by intervention — provided we can 
find an intervention strong enough. Iluxley's horrible 
doctrine of depravity is a libel on human nature. There is 
a doctrine of depravity, but it is not his terrible indictment. 
The naturalist is harsher than any extremist theologian. 
All depravity now seen is lapse from a better state of 
man. Sin is not an original part of human nature. It 
was put in, without destroying the soul, and it can be 
taken out. The present state is due to bad intervention. 
The race has capacity for good intervention. It is sal- 
vable. It is redeemable. Rescue is possible. There is 
magnificent capability. As there has been a sinless past, 
so there will be a sinless future for rescued human na- 
ture. The law that evolves from worst to worst, if not 
suspended, can at least be antagonized. The bad catas- 
trophe can be met by the good redemption. And that is 
the grand hope of humanity. Outside of divine inter- 
vention there is no chance for man. The future history 
of humanity, according to Huxley's words, is to ' repeat 
the process.' Christ's religion has hopefulness, because 
of a peculiar intervention for the restoration of our 
human nature to its pristine perfectness. Sin, normal to 
man in the brilliant naturalist's description of him, is 
abnormal in our Christian view. Our human nature, 



THE DIVINE INTERVENTIOX REALIZED. 119 

perfect once, is capable of becoming, in this gospel way^ 
perfect again. God antagonizes the natural process 
which, left unrelieved by outward aid, would only repeat 
itself evermore. And nothing else so honors man's ca- 
pacity as does this Christianity, which sees with such 
clear vision that man was capable of Eden, and is capa- 
ble of heaven, because capable of being rescued by a 
special redemption." 

He said : " You are putting things in an entirely new 
way. I see that your Christianity, if true, would account 
for some things, or, at least, would lighten somewhat 
the heavy burden that any view of human nature forces 
upon us. I have been wont to think that the Scriptures 
degraded man rather than exalted him, and I have held 
the Bible responsible for making a heavy indictment 
against mankind." 

I replied: "You are not alone in charging the Bible 
unjustly with a good many things. I have heard men 
talk as if the Bible were responsible for the introduction 
of sin and for all the depravity of the race ; as if it made 
men sin, when it simply finds them sinners and honestly 
says so. All the sad facts of the world would be just as 
sad as now were the biblical religion false. Sin and 
death, and all the forebodings of another world for 
wrong-doers, would be just the same. The religion of 
the Bible does not make sin ; it points it out as already 
existing. Nobody blames a medical work for describing 
disease. Nobody charges it with responsibility for the 
sickness it declares. It tells of the sickness so that it 
may tell of the antidote. All gospel facts are glad facts 
for this world and the next. The news of the interven- 



120 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

tion is * the good Dews ' — i. e., the gospel. Siu and deprav- 
ity and doom here or hereafter are not things that the 
Bible makes true. It names them, to tell men how to 
escape them. No other book so praises man's original 
capacity for moral exaltation. No other book shows him 
such a hopeful outlook. He is by capacity a child of 
God, and is capable of complete rescue from sin and an 
absolutely perfect heaven. True, if he is a sinner with 
such powers, his sin is all the more grave. So that the 
grander his capacities the greater his guilt. But even 
this view is not to shut him up to 'repeat the process.' 
He is capable of receiving an intervention and a salva- 
tion. Hence, the Scriptural presentations, viz., that God 
made man 'in his own imaged 'Death has passed upon all 
men, for that all men have sinned.' ' God sent forth his Son 
to redeem.' ' He hath made him to be sin for us who knew 
no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in 
him.' ' God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten 
Son.' The lock has somewhere a key. It looks as if this 
key might have been made for that lock. Tlie need of 
an outside interference, and that, too, by the great God 
himself, and jointly, man's capacity for being rescued, 
are facts too clear not to commend themselves. Jesus 
Christ himself claimed that his mission was to restore 
the old, lost, natural sonship. He said : ' The servant 
abideth not ' — by any natural right — ' in the house for- 
ever. But the son abideth ever.' The son had posses- 
sion. Sin is the usurping servant who holds sway. But 
the servant, sin, is not there because the house was made 
for him. He is not of necessity a permanent dweller. 
He is in nowise needed as a part of its completeness. 



THE DIVINE INTERYEXTION EEALIZED. 121 

He can be expelled. Christ came to cast out the usurp- 
ing servant and reinstate the rightful son." 

His response was in these words : " Well, I think I 
must plead guilty to one thing. I certainly have put the 
responsibility for all the bad and sad facts upon the leli- 
gion of the Bible, and I have not given it the least 
credit for the good and glad facts it seems to offer to 
men." 

" One thing more," I said, " about this matter of ca- 
pacity. Il seems to me that a man's greatest capacity is 
bis capacity for faith, ' his ability to believe on evidence 
in what some one, who knows the truth on a special sub- 
ject, testifies to him,' his capacity for knowing more than 
he by his personal powers could ever know. He can 
believe in a knowledge superior to his own, and rest con- 
fidently and act consistently on the knowledge which any 
one, who in a given line is his superior, may communicate 
to him. He has the power to trust a specialist in physi- 
cal geography who tells him of rivers, oceans and conti- 
nents beyond his own ken. He can trust a specialist in 
astronomy, who tells him of the approaching eclipse, and 
not a man in a civilized land doubts that the astronomi- 
cal event will come exactly on time. Nine-tenths of our 
knowledge comes from trust in specialists. Trust or faith 
is the hand that uses other men's hands. We grasp by it 
things beyond our unaided reach and make them our 
own. This capacity for faith is of the greatest service 
in every department of life. Without it human progress 
would be impossible. We trust specialists in their own 
department. God is a specialist in religion. He ad- 
dresses our capacity for faith in himself and makes it, 



122 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

here as elsewhere, the chief avenue of knowledge. We 
are gifted with this power of going out of ourselves, 
and taking hold of the testimony of God, so that we may 
be raised thereby. If we are made to trust, then God 
has made something or some one to be trusted. The 
divine intervention for redeeming man will then address 
itself to our faith primarily ; just as does all else that is 
highest and best which we know. The moral sphere will 
use faith as its especial method ; faith in God being as 
reasonable as it is right. A gospel from God will have 
its evidences that God has spoken, and those evidences 
will address themselves to our reason ; but what he will 
say in that gospel of intervention will be of higher range 
than our reason, or there would be no need of his saying 
it. K all he has to say is only what w^e could find out by 
our reason, and if our reason is the test of what he says 
in his proven gospel, then God could teach us nothing. 
And while man could teach man about astronomy or 
geography, and even about religion, God could teach man 
nothing that he did not know aside from the teaching. 
In short, in man's capacity for faith lies his greatest 
hope; for by it he can lay hold of God's intervention and 
salvation. So that rescue must come from without as an 
objective fact, but, in some way, that rescue must be 
seized upon by man. He has a hand. Then there is 
something on which to lay hold. The hand is that of 
faith laying hold of divine intervention." 

Mr. B had shown great interest in these views of 

the need of divine interference. The idea of man as 
needing to be saved from his religious mistakes by a 
force outside his own development, and also the idea of 



THE DIVINE INTEEVENTION REALIZED. 123 

man's original dignity and of him as now capable of 
grasping a deliverance which God should send him, evi- 
dently took very firm hold on his mind. He begged me 
to call the next week. And after a brief prayer I took 
mv leave. 



CHAPTER IX. 

AUTHORITY IN RELIGION. 

MR. B at the next interview handed me a popu- 
lar Saturday evening newspaper, in which was a 
sermon by a distinguished clergyman. He asked me 
what I thought of it. After looking it over for a few 
moments I returned it and answered his question by ask- 
ing the same. 

" I will tell you frankly," he said. " This sermon 
denies to Jesus Christ anything beyond mere manhood. 
It only allows him a higher development of manhood 
than was gained by any one else in his day. Now, I have 
no patience with this sort of thing. It is sometimes 
thought that this letting down of Christianity is the way 
to win those of us who are sceptically inclined. But I 
know better ; for I know what such men think and say. It 
is either infidelity, as you religious people call it, or it is 
Christianity for me and for the world. It makes no 
converts to Christianity to belittle its Christ. He cer- 
tainly claimed, if we can trust the record, to be more 
than a mere man. The prophecies that announced him, 
his own express declarations, his constant claims upon 
the supreme allegiance of mankind, his works — if indeed, 
we can believe them miraculous — are all unmistakable. 
If the record is trustworthy, he was divine as well human. 
In one way these claims make it harder for us to receive 
Christianity ; but, on the other hand, if we do receive 
124 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION. 125 

him, we have an authority worth something to us. But 
to try to account for Christianity by saying that Jesus 
was a man with a ' genius for religion,' and that he saw 
' some things clearer than other men in his day,' is less 
reverent to Christ, when we remember his claims, than 
outright unbelief. I must be one thing or tlie other, a 
Christian or a sceptic. A man who absurdly tries to 
stand on any middle ground is swept by the guns of both 
sides. There must be authority or there can be no relig- 
ion. The only sufficient authority must be divine." 

I said : " What you have just asserted does not sur- 
prise me. In conversation with other men inclined to be 
sceptical, the same fact has been declared." 

Wishing to get his answer, 1 said : " What would be 
your reply, then, to words like these in the sermon : ' If a 
man reasons at all on the subject of religion, he admits 
by the fact of adducing reasons, the supremacy of reason 
over any book or any person ; and that is to deny the 
supremacy of Jesus Christ and the Bible. The last 
tribunal must be our reason.' " 

" I should say," he answered, " that this is very poor 
logic. For if the existence of Jesus Christ is conceded, 
then on the lowest ground, viz., that ' he had a genius for 
religion,' his conclusions are to be carefully considered ; 
and if the Bible be considered as from God, certainly 
God can instruct man." 

" Then you think," I rejoined, " a case can be imagined 
in which a man's own reason may have to submit to 
higher authority." 

" Yes, if you are only sure of the authority in any 
teaching on religion. Given divine authority, and you 



126 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

have divine reason. And if we can have it, then religion 
is possible, and then only. All outside of authority is so 
much speculation on such matters ; or at most, if we can 
only find those things on which all men agree in religion, 
the belief in them may be called reasonable. We may 
hope those things are true. But even then, what we want 
in religion is authority. If we have divine authority, 
then it would be reasonable to submit reason itself to 
such authority. Only, it is to be noted, this divine au- 
thority must be proved to be such." 

" Exactly so," I replied. " You have made for me 
just the place I wanted in my argument for to-day. The 
authority of a supernatural person, such as we claim 
that Jesus Christ actually was, is the view I wanted to 
present in this conversation. AVe saw, last week, that we 
could not have, even in Jesus Christ, a perfect man, 
unless there was also another nature, an added divine 
nature. We were in search of an authority by which we 
could be delivered from those ' endless delusions which 
men have called religious,' and I was showing the per- 
fectness of Christianity in that it expressly provides for 
this very thing. Christianity as a scheme presents Jesus 
Christ as competent authority in religion. The great 
question in every age is that of authority for crediting 
religious beliefs, about which, in the nature of the case, 
the human mind cannot of itself know the facts. The 
facts of religion all run out into infinity. They are 
largely beyond our ken. We see a little way. Then 
comes mist. We want to know. We must know to 
understand our duty. Reason goes a little distance and 
is self-limited. But reason can judge concerning the 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION. 127 

competence of authority. It can know whether in any 
sphere of knowledge a man is trustworthy, even when it 
cannot pronounce of itself upon the deliverances of 
authority as right or wrong. It can discover the fact 
that a person is trustworthy as a witness, when it does not 
know a word he will say. It is competent to judge 
whether a certain astronomer is to be credited when he 
predicts an eclipse even when one is unable to verify the 
calculation. 

"A man's reason," I continued, "is a competent judge 
on two conditions ; first, when the things on which it 
judges are in its own sphere ; and second, when it has 
before it all the essential facts. It is a fair question for 
a man's reason to decide whether a supernatural person, 
such as Christianity claims its Christ to be, has ever 
really appeared among men. And so Christianity ofiers 
itself as a historic religion, with names, dates, places, 
facts, declarations ; and it appeals to proofs and demands 
to be judged by the rules of ordinary evidence. It sub- 
mits reasonable proofs that it is from God. In this sense, 
it claims to be a thoroughly reasonable religion. It 
exhibits credentials. It calls attention to an authentic 
and proven signature. It asks candid men to judge 
whether the signature is or is not genuine. It is because 
Christianity claims, in this sense, to be a reasonable 
religion, that I am here arguing about it. I am showing 
that it offers to man's reason its proofs of a Christ; that 
this Christ is one who can speak with authority ; and that 
when we have once proved him to be such a Christ, then, 
not our reason, but this Christ himself is full and final 
authority in religion ; that we accept his deliverances even 



128 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

though in the nature of the case they will not always 
agree with what, apart from his testimony, we should 
conclude to be reasonable and right. We are competent 
to sit in judgment on his claims ; that done, we receive 
his utterances, depending on them as firmly as if we our- 
selves understood all the reasons that led him to make 
them. Not we ourselves, but he himself, in that case, is 
final authority.'' 

I reminded him that I had acted a few weeks before 
as a witness to his signature to his will ; that I was a 
competent witness on that matter ; that whether I did or 
did not approve of the instrument had nothing to do with 
the fact of the signature as genuine ; that it was not even 
necessary for me to know a word of the document ; that 
I might have my opinion of what its contents would be ; 
that, should I ever know them, I might or might not find 
them to be what I expected he would put into the testa- 
ment he had made. The one thing is this : That I am a 
competent witness to the signature. Some things, should 
I ever hear the document read, might appear to me from 
my position unwise or even unjust. But I do not know 
all the reasons that led you to make a given bequest. 
Did I know them, the unreasonable might appear most 
reasonable, and that which at first seemed wrong might 
be the most righteous section of the instrument. My 
sphere of action, meanwhile, is that of testifying to the 
signature — a matter in which I am a competent witness. 

He at once acknowled^red the distinction ; and that 
Jesus Christ, once proved to have divine authority of 
statement, we are not entitled to sit in judgment on his 
declarations or to reject any of his utterances. We can 



AUTHORITY IK RELIGION. 129 

compare them and discuss their meaning. It is ours, in 
that ease, unhesitatingly to accept his deliverances in 
religion. " But," he added, after a moment's pause, " are 
you not arguing in behalf of the Bible ? " 

'*No," I replied, " not distinctively for the Bible, ex- 
cept as, incidentally, it would seem that we should need 
some sort of trustworthy record of Christ's authoritative 
teachings. My aim is now to show that Christianity as 
a scheme provides, in its peculiar Christ, for the authority 
so needful in religion ; and that this provision and this 
supply of the need, are among the proofs that it is the one 
true religion. 

"As to the other easel named, in which human reason 
is entirely competent, viz., where it can know all the 
essential facts about a transaction, let me say that every 
great doctrine of religion lies in a region, for the most 
part, where only one Being can know enough about it to 
warrant definite and positive assertion. Take the doc- 
trine of atonement. All the facts involved, all the reasons 
for it, all the relations of it to God and to man, all the 
amazing reach and sweep (^f it, are evidently far beyond 
our comprehension. We see a few of the many elements 
tliat enter into the one only complete atonement. From 
what we see, we are convinced that there is far more of 
it which is and must be unseen by us. We discover 
beginnings which warrant the belief of magnificent com- 
pletions. We see as through a glass darkly. We know 
that so much runs on into eternity whither our eye can- 
not reach, that we are incapable of getting the facts 
before us, and our judgment must be impotent ; so that 
we can accept, and, equally, we can deny atonement, only 

I 



130 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

upon divine authority. It is the same with prayer, as 
answered or unanswered. Good reasoning can obtain on 
both sides of that question. Only divine authority can 
settle the matter for us. It is the same with the way of 
salvation ; the same with the doctrine of a final judgment 
day ; and it is the same with an eternal heaven. Not a 
little good logic can be offered both for and against these 
doctrines. The one can be pitted against the other. We 
must have authority, or cease all definite affirmations. 
Infidelity needs divine authority in order to be credible 
as really as does Christianity." 

He interrupted me, saying with some sharpness of 
tone : '' How is that ? How is that ? " 

" It is this way : that on all these great doctrines the 
infidel creed is just as long as is the Christian. For a 
man to say, 'I believe there is no heaven' is just as 
much to propound a portion of his creed as for another 
man to say "' I do believe in an eternal heaven.' And to say 
either one of these things positively, apart from divine 
authority, is as unwarranted in the one case as in the 
other. Argument is offered for each of these views. And 
whether or not the argument is convincing depends 
largely upon the personality of the one to whom it is 
addressed. An eternal heaven rather than an eternal 
probation is held by many persons to be among the 
things that cannot be proved by any human reasoning. 
It is a matter in which our only absolute assurance must 
be competent authority. And Christianity furnishes in 
its Christ one whose declaration is the only valid proof." 

" Why not, then," he responded, '" let all these ques- 
tions go ? " 



AUTHORITY IX RELIGION. 131 

"Just because, Mr. B , it cannot be done. Just 

because men will and must think of them. It is in our 
very constitution not to ' let them go.' They will not 
depart. From the very first, men have asked how shall 
man be just with God, and never has an age asked it more 
earnestly than this. Let no man think that questions 
about atonement, prayer and salvation, questions of 
eternal life and death, are to be dropped out of our nine- 
teenth century thought. Never were they more keenly 
debated. Once these questions were discussed mainly by 
religious men ; now they are taken up, at least on their 
literary side, by literary and scientific men who make 
not even a profession of religion. I saw lately a list of 
some fifty volumes by authors whose intellectual calibre 
was shown by their whole style, both of thought and 
expression, as no mean foemen — all of whom dealt with 
these questions more or less in the spirit of denial. Men 
do not spend themselves in this fashion over dead issues. 
They do not kick at corpses. These questions are live 
issues in all human thought the world around and the 
ages through. It is not in human nature to drop them. 
Every man will have something to say about them. 
There are no religious questions that have not a lite- 
rary and a philosophical side. They are of surpassing 
interest in one way or another to all men. If it is, as 
some would hold, foolish to discuss them because by 
reason alone we can never decide them, still the majority 
of the human race will commit that foolishness. When 
the philosophic interest in them does not fascinate men, 
the tremendous personal interests involved will compel 
attention ; and men are ofoino; to think and feel and act 



132 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

in reference to these things as long as human nature en- 
dures on earth. To insist that interest in such doctrines 
is foolishness, is to insist that men are, on this matter, a 
race of lunatics. And as men go on in the discussion of 
these questions, it becomes increasingly evident that there 
can be no final solution except that of divine authority. 
For, not reason, not intuition, nor yet consciousness, even 
when it is Christian consciousness, can give us the last 
and satisfying word, siuf^e these are matters where it is 
reasonable to take only the utterances of a supernatural 
Christ. Apart from his declarations there will be no 
certainty. And because Christianity sees this need and 
provides for it, and no other religion furnishes such a 
Christ, it gives evidence alike of its origin and its truth- 
fulness." 

He said : " But other religions have their saviours. I 
found at a bookstore lately a volume entitled ' Twelve 
Saviours or One.' " 

" Did you read it ? " 

"Yes." 

" And you found it a bungling attempt to throw dis- 
credit on Jesus Christ.*' 

" That is true. It was a strained effort to show that 
each of the great religions had some one who in some re- 
spects helped men." 

" All of which goes to show that the yearning, often 
blind and unregulated, is still in human souls ; that the 
capacity for receiving the Christ of God still exists, while 
the mistaken and superstitious efforts to satisfy the yearn- 
ing show the need of real and divine intervention. 
There has been but one Christ, who first deepens the 



AUTHOEITY IN RELIGION. 133 

natural sense of need, and then fills up all the channels 
of our broadest thought and profoundest longing with 
the gracious flow and overflow of his own fullness. Jesus 
Christ, a Saviour at all, is a peculiar Saviour, unique in 
person, in character, in work, in teaching, in death, res- 
urrection and ascension. His massed peculiarities make 
him the Saviour, in a sense in which he can have no 
rivals, and in which a superior is impossible. So that 
Jesus Christ a Saviour, and also the Saviour, he must 
necessarily be the only Saviour. In the line of authority, 
he is complete. The need is not of God in man — that 
has always been more or less true since Adam's day, and 
that were no novelty, however much the divine illumina- 
tions might be increased ; since always there would be 
the limitation of human power to receis^e the measure 
of the divine nature. It is not only ' God in Christ' 
that we need, but it is God and man united in a single 
personality, thus giviug us sympathy and authority, thus 
spanning the widest contrasts and harmonizing the 
greatest diversiiies, so that this Christ could utter words 
which would have been blasphemy on any other lip, but 
which could come with all graciousness and potency from 
his. The idea of such a Christ is unmatched in human 
thinking. The conception is a miracle in a world of 
thought, just as its realization in Jesus Christ is a miracle 
in the world of fact. That incarnated ideal in Jesus 
Christ sets Christianity at an immeasurable distance from 
any other religion. As a system of thought, as a mere 
scheme to be studied for its logical and intellectual com- 
pleteness, it is not only unrivalled, but unapproachable. 
The profound need of One on whom to depend is per- 



134 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

fectly met in him. And it seems to me that a wise man 
will cling, to this authoritative Christ until he shall find 
a better, grander, more wonderful and glorious Christ — 
one with more startling works as evidences of his char- 
acter and mission, one with a tenderer compassion, one 
who will be more helpful to us while we live and offer 
to us a more assured and complete salvation when we die. 
There not only is not, but there cannot be such another 
Christ. This key perfectly fits the lock." 

I continued: "Already you must be beginning to see 
that the certainty which Christianity offers to your un- 
rest is a most engaging feature of this religion. I have 
been aiming to let you see for yourself the inside of this 
religion ; its wonderfulness as a scheme, its fitness to do 
the work demanded of a religion ; and though we have 
gone over but one little segment of this great circle, day 
by day in these conversations, and have kept ourselves 
mainly thus far to the idea of authority in religion as 
rightfully emanating from such a person as Jesus Christ, 
I think you will see, as the system is opening before you, 
that it is a vastly wider and grander thing than you had 
thought. It is at least worthy of your study from the 
inside. If I can only get you to grasp its central thought 
of a Christ, to take in broadly the conception of what 
Christianity really is, as it brings him forward, I am sure 
to get your final conviction to its truthfulness. Just as 
sunlight is the best proof of the sun, so an actual view 
of this religion is the best evidence that it comes from 
God. It is this inside survey that I want you to take." 

He replied that he had always looked at the outside 
rather than the inside; that he had seen the surface 



AUTHOKITY IN RELIGION. 135 

rather than the heart of the system. He said : " I have 
done a good deal of reading on the wrong side. Per- 
haps if I could get my health again, I would go down 
and hear you preach." 

I thanked him for the compliment, and reminded him 
that though we had known each other for several years, I 
had never seen him at church. He said he had not been 
a church-goer. I asked him if that was fair treatment 
of religion. 

" No," he said. "I admit it is not the right thing. A 
man might profitably spend one day in seven in religious 
inquiry and among religious people. Especially is this 
true for me now, as I am getting to see what sort of a 
religion this Christianity actually is." 

I took my leave, with more hope that the result of 
these interviews would be advantageous to my friend. 



CHAPTER X. 



THE FACT OF SIN. 



MR. B continued comfortable. He was ready to 
proceed at once in our discussion for the day. I 
said : •' I think you admitted the reality of error." 

" Yes ; error on all subjects, especially on religions. I 
cannot imagine anything more real than these errors of 
men." 

" But," I replied, " an error when made through preju- 
dice or passion, through lack of attention, or through lack 
of sympathy with a truth, may be also a sin. Approach- 
ing the matter from the intellectual side, you must admit 
that a man, on some questions, does wrong who makes a 
mistake." He nodded affirmatively, and I continued: 
'' Sin, then, is just as real in the moral as is error in the 
intellectual realm ; and a man may be as responsible for 
the one as for the other ; and in a given case may be 
responsible for both. ' The object of science,' says Mr. 
Huxley, 'is the discovery of the rational order which 
pervades the universe.' What the eminent scientist says 
is true, but it is the lesser part of the whole truth ; for, 
in addition to the rational order, we must recognize the 
moral order of the universe. As science is the restoration 
to man's conception of the one, so religion is his restora- 
tion to the true conception of the other — the vastly more 
important thing being this moral order. And this fact 
136 



THE FACT OF SIN. 137 

of sin, since it touches the core of things, since it is offen- 
sive to what is most central in God, and to what is deep- 
est, broadest, highest and most vital to our own souls, is 
a tremendous fact; and so it is one that always has and 
always will demand and receive the notice of all men in 
their calmest, noblest moments. The sin-consciousness in 
the history of man is as actual a fact as any other that 
can be named ; as certainly a conviction of man's soul as 
that God is, as that truth is, as that duty is. And human 
history has not a page that would not be vastly otherwise, 
were there no such deep-down and central conviction in 
human nature. You recall the startling confessions of 
the Greek and Latin moralists ; their strong sense of 
personal defection, their consciousness of bondage under 
the law of evil. All the great tragedians — especially 
those of the Greek school — founded every grand presen- 
tation of human life, in poem and play, on the reality of 
this sin-consciousness. It is a simple and undeniable 
fact — this accusation of conscience as to sin." 
He interrupted me to quote from Macbeth : 

" Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand ? No. This my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 
Making the green one red." 

" But," he added, in a moment, " is not all this true 
rather of the great men who have committed great crimes, 
and not of humanity in its rank and file ? " 

" It is man as man, the universal man, who has built 
altars in every age ; so that a race of men without heads 
would be as likely to be discovered as a race without a 



138 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

religion ; and in every case the altar has had on it the 
sacrifice suggested by this cry of the sin-consciousness. The 
sacrifice may have been horrible, or grotesque, or absurd. 
But it was an attempt, blindly made, it may be, but still 
actually made, to meet an actually felt need of expiation, 
so as to get rid of this sense of sin. Not lowest men, but 
highest, nor heathen men only, but devoutest and loftiest 
souls as well, have felt this sin-consciousness. Take the 
case of David, the Hebrew bard, whose words are more 
widely quoted than those of any other singer the world 
ever knew. For years, a singularly pure and religious 
soul, then sinning, and next moaning and sobbing out 
his contrition in the fifty-first psalm. That psalm once 
read, no man will ever again reproach him, but ever- 
more pity him in his genuine abasement before his God. 
This man emerges from his sin at length, a better man ; 
hi^ after life as pure as his former had been. And 
Isaiah, foremost man of his day in personal purity and 
in lofty religious patriotism, seeing in the temple the 
* vision of God,' cries out, ' Unclean, unclean.' Christian 
men and women of highest character have testified to this 
same sense of sin — never stronger than in their loftiest 
moments when they most felt that they were in the 
immediate presence of their God. By putting into the 
petition known as the Lord's Prayer the sentence ' forgive 
us,' the Author of Christianity shows us that in his idea 
sin is to be, and is to be pardoned daily, so long as man 
endures on the earth. This clearly defined fact of the 
sense of sin, in good and bad, in high and low, in ignor- 
ant and cultured, in Pagan and Christian, in earlier and 
in later ages, is most remarkable. It is a fact that must 



THE FACT OF SIN. 139 

be met in some way, and on some consistent theory. If 
a falsehood, it is one bound up ineradicably in the very 
constitution of man as now we find it. If a falsehood, 
then no deliverance of human consciousness on any mat- 
ter is of the least authority or value, and we need not try 
to blind ourselves to the conclusion that men are not 
only intellectually but also morally insane.*' 

He said in reply that he had always been perplexed 
about this matter of the sense of sin in the human race. 
He admitted the immense force of the convictiou as 
shown in the history of the world. But he asked whether 
this sense of sin \vas not less in the nineteenth century 
than ever before ? 

I answered : '' Some things regarded once as sinful are 
now reckoned as innocent and even praiseworthy ; so 
that, in the change of standard, there is doubtless, in 
some directions, no little relief. There were men who 
once were in agony over a saint's day forgotten, over a 
fast-day omitted, a church rule broken. There were men 
who once held any indulgence in natural and healthful 
recreations to be wrong ; that the gratification of taste 
in music, in art, in any other than strictly religious 
literature, was wrong ; that any indulgence in human 
affection was so much stolen from one's love to God ; 
that care for the body was a wrong done to the soul. The 
correction of these mistakes as to duty, in one way, les- 
sened the number of things thought to be sinful, and so 
reduced the sense of sin in regard to such things. But on 
the other hand, the better understanding of religion has 
opened whole reaches of duty in the line of right think- 
ing and right feeling and right actins:, in the line of 



140 HOUKS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

regenerate Christian living, and in the service of God 
and of man, that were almost unknown before. 

There is a new wide world coming into view, in the 
soul's larger relations to God and to the Holy Spirit ; in 
the broadened duties owed by man to his neighbor, owed 
by each to ail the rest of the human race ; so that now 
an instructed conscience sees a thousand things in which 
there are shortcoming and failure and sin, where once 
the old outwardness of the religious view neither saw nor 
suspected any wrong. I believe an intelligent sense of 
sin was never so strong as it is to-day." He looked up 
with an incredulous glance, and I continued : " The proof 
of what you think a strong assertion, is found, among 
other things, in the strenuous efforts to get rid of this sin- 
consciousness. In more thoughtful men, it takes the 
form of philosophic reasoning. Take the new doctrine of 
heredity — new, indeed, in name, but a very old Scriptural 
doctrine. It is hardly a quarter of a century ago, that 
the stock objection to the Bible was that it proposed to 
visit the sin of the fathers on the children, even to the 
third and fourth generation. Now, everybody owns that 
this is exactly what we often see. But the undeniable 
law of heredity is used as a plea for the lessening of guilt. 
The blameworthiness is scattered over the line of ancestry, 
and personal responsibility is reduced to a minimum, or is 
altogether dissipated. Drunkard, libertine and thief are 
not only busy at their old work, but have the new occu- 
pation of attributing their wrong-doing to their heredity 
instead of blaming themselves. They are getting to be 
facile at excusing personal sin. They are forgetting that 
the endorsement of the tendency by the individual actor 



THE FACT OF SIN. 141 

is not only his sin, but is the adoption of the tendency 
itself, and so makes one responsible therefor. Heredity 
with personality makes larger responsibility ; and if one 
does the wrong, it makes the larger sin ; there is not 
only the inherited, but the personal depravity. And the 
sense of the sin is made more condemnatory, to thought- 
ful men, by the very effort to excuse it. In the same 
way, frivolous persons turn from the seriousness of relig- 
ious duty, under the plea of natural disposition ; and un- 
spiritual men give as an excuse for absorbing worldliness 
that they were not born with a religious nature, — thus 
endorsing the old biblical idea of heredity in a fallen 
race. The plea owns the blameworthiness, but locates it 
in other personalities, or finds it in the guiltiness of the 
general human race ; the plea acknowledges the fact of 
the sin. One wonders how those who thus admit the 
fact, and then put off the blame of it on ancestry, are 
going to escape the idea of a first father's first sin in 
Eden, and its influence on every child of Adam ever 
since that day, so that we are * born in sin.' " 

He looked up and said, " Is not that pretty strong 
orthodoxy ? " 

" Yes, heredity is orthodoxy on that point. But you 
must recall one of our conversations a few weeks ago on 
the doctrine of personality in God and in man. Heredity 
and personality are twin facts, and instead of substract- 
ing something from each because of the other, they are 
both the stronger, because each is true. Heredity en- 
larges the duty of personality. You are to be, person- 
ally, a better man, because you have children who take 
from you the ineffaceable stamp of your very self." 



142 HOURS WITH A SCEPTia 

" It is the same with environment — the great word of 
one class of modern scientists. It is used by some men 
to excuse personal wrong- doing ; to annul the sin -con- 
sciousness. It is held that a man is the product of his 
age as well as of his ancestry ; of his surroundings as well as 
of his heritage, and often of both. He is the fly im- 
prisoned in the amber. He must be about what he is, in 
the entanglement of his circumstances. The principle is 
pushed so far that it throws off the blame for undeniable 
wrongs, for frightful abuses in social life, for desperate 
evils in the community, and for the depravity of the 
race, upon impersonal surroundings. Of course, there is 
a power of environment. Laocoon and his sons are en- 
tangled in the serpent's folds. Classic story, universal 
philosophy and the Christian Scriptures, all agree in the 
fact of a mighty moral entanglement. Evil is a bondage 
on the race, and a drag on the man. But we are to note 
very carefully that the fact of the sin is always conceded. 
These folds of the writhing, strangling serpent are very 
real. Here are fetters on the wrists made by these chains. 
Sin is something, or somebody is responsible. Is it really 
a question about some thing ? Are things morally re- 
sponsible ? Many a man who presses so strongly his 
environment as the excuse for his sin, would snap those 
bonds in the case of social obstacles. Some such men, on 
matters such as intemperance and deceit, have done it. 
But here is the further trouble: these natural and social 
obstacles are only the shadows of a greater entanglement 
and of a worse environment. It is moral wrong afloat on 
all the moral atmosphere of the world ; it is a moral 
miasma, rising like a fiend from pestilential craters, and 



THE FACT OF SIN. 143 

sweeping over the plains where men pass their lives, — it is 
these that make up a part of this environment. It is 
a moral wrong that engirds and enfolds and throws over us 
its spell, and enchants us with its dreams and infects us 
with its virus. It is this moral encompassment of a 
broken moral order, admitting into it a whole world of 
maxims, and proverbs and sayings, the " portable wis- 
dom " which each generation calls, admiringly, the " spirit 
of the age," and which is always colored and controlled 
by the lower, rather than the higher thinking, and by 
worldly rather than by Christian sentiment — it is this 
encompassment that is so significant, and that is urged so 
often as a plea for doing the wrong. One must do as 
Romans do, at Rome, it is said. 'As well be out of the 
world as out of the fashion, either in dress or in thought.' 
There is false tone ; there is confusion as to the pitch, and 
discord in the song. ' What does one voice avail,' it is said, 
' against this resounding chorus ? ' And all this con- 
fusion and environment and entanglement of evil, as a 
thoughtful man ponders it, comes to be very suggestive. 
A wise man asks of himself whether he, in his own soul, 
is quite free from all this thing. Is his own polarity 
undisturbed? Has he himself any real freedom from 
this entanglement? Is he himself not also somewhere 
perverted as really as those others whose perversity he 
condemns ? Is not he himself also partaker of this 
heredity of wrong, this environment of sin ? He sees 
others as tempters. Is he himself also a tempter ? He 
asks whether he may not be leading, in some wrong way, 
other souls, — whether he has not a double responsibility, 
first for himself and next for all he has influenced and can 



144 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

now touch through this environment. So that, when a man , 
thinks this thing through, he sees that he environs others as 
well as they him, and that his personal responsibility is 
vastly enlarged, rather than at all diminished, by en- 
vironment. He begins to ask whether sin is not the 
more real and vital and personal amid such a state of 
things than if we were separate Adams, each in an Eden, 
where there could be neither environment nor posterity." 
"Then, too," I continued, ''the evil environment has 
been in not a few cases a counter-irritant. It has fur- 
nished the best discipline, and given largest room for 
conscious victory. A man in an intemperate family has 
awakened to the fact that drink has ruined a father or a 
brother. Their destruction is his warning. He will not 
be wrecked on that reef. By a tremendous effort of will 
he has thrown himself out of his environment and into 
the opposite surroundings, and so has secured a character 
impossible to be obtained by those who have not been 
subjected to his struggles. Storms give reputation to 
pilots. A sinful world without, and a wrong bent within, 
are immensely formidable things, but they afford scope 
for conquest. So that a man's very environment of evil, 
if not quite overwhelming, may furnish, during these 
probationary days, to himself and to his God, the largest 
opportunity for moral rescue. An evil environment that 
is absolutely overwhelming is one in which a man is not 
salvable. But a limited environment, in which rescue 
can come only from a divine rescuer, may fix in a man's 
soul a profound sense of the reality of sin and of its 
amazing hold on his deepest nature. There is shown the 
stored force of evil. There is such a thing as moral 



THE FACT OF SIN. 145 

dyDamite ready for the explosion at the fatal touch. In 
such a case a man is all the more bound to walk carefully, 
since a single spark may ignite this magazine. Person- 
ality is stronger than ever in these circumstances. The 
environment, instead of subtracting anything, adds im- 
mensely to the sin of personal wrong-doing. Like hered- 
ity, environment may increase, beyond all human compu- 
tation, one's individual condemnation. 

" But all these efforts, so futile and yet so earnest and 
persistent, to throw off personal responsibility for sin, 
show the inner uneasiness. Tiie struggle shows the 
strength of the antagonist. And the lower depths of the 
soul are reached sometimes when God lets down the 
deep-sea plummet, by his Providence, his Word, and his 
Spirit. Despite all excuses, we men know that there has 
been wronir done, done by our central selves; and we 
sometimes find that we are ourselves the wrong." 

He said : " This whole matter of sin is a great perplex- 
ity. When we look at men in large cycles, the feeling 
which you call the self-consciousness certainly hfi.=5 been 
a factor in human history. But, for the most part, 
individual men, so far as I can see, are not very much 
concerned about it. They seem to get on very easily, 
as if it did not greatly burden them. And yet when 
trouble comes — " he stopped short in his sentence. Pres- 
ently he added the words — " trouble such as I have now," 
— he here paused again. As if speaking to himself, a 
moment or two after, he added : " I wish I knew whether 
or not this sense of sin in man was a genuine thing, or 
was due to despoTidency in sickness ; was a matter of fact, 
or a matter of weak nerves." 

K 



146 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

I said: "If only sick people through the ages had felt 
and acted under it, if only nervous patients in physicians' 
hands had known this experience, it would be another 
thing. But the calmest reasoners, the sanest souls, the 
foremost men in moral action, the most gifted of the 
world's millions, are among those who, in their best and 
surest moral hours, have testified to the fact of the sin- 
consciousness. It is not a sick man's whim, nor the 
imposition of priestly ideas on human nature. It is 
among the most genuine and certain and reliable con- 
victions ever found in human souls. The efforts to get 
rid of it by propitiations of various sorts, in every religion, 
which, at immense cost, men have maintained all over 
the globe, show at once the reality and the potency of 
the conviction." 

" Yes," he said. " I only gave expression to a passing 
thought as to the possible unreliability of the conviction. 
Sin is a very real thing. But how do you account for 
the fact that very great sinners seem often to have very 
little compunction for their sin ? " 

" Have you not noticed," I replied, " that very singular 
operation of law whereby the sharpness of a man's detec- 
tive power in any question of right and wrong is blunted 
by misuse ? The eye of his discernment grows dim. His 
judgment on moral questions gets confused and uncer- 
tain. It is a case of sin punished by the sinner being left 
to do more sinniug. It is by no means the whole of 
conscience that is thus benumbed. For conscience is 
capable of retroaction under new light as to old facts. It 
has in leash a power of condemnation, which, in the 
nature of the faculty, is sure to break loose and spring 



THE FACT OF SIN. 147 

like a crouching tiger at the soul as its prey. Its action 
over the past seen in the clearer light of eternal truth is 
sure to be felt at length — unless, indeed, we can think 
that a quiet conscience can be equally and permanently 
gained by great vice and by great virtue ; that a hardened 
and a sensitive conscience bring the same lesult in the 
end. For when conscience does not condemn, it must be 
because it is seared by sin or satisfied by innocence. The 
one other case is when it has condemned and then is 
pacified by the forgiveness of God. But, naturally, the 
condemnatory power is in it, and it can be awakened. 
There is an abiding fear that one may meet something 
that shall rouse it ; and hence the effort to keep down 
and out of sight this self-consciousness, until a man, 
screening from his own vision his deeper convictions, 
and living by the surface of his thoughts, feels, as he 
wishes to feel, little disturbance. The reason why so 
many men get on so easily and with so little exercise of 
conscience, and so small a sense of sin, is that very many 
persons, in the words of Christ, do ' not come to the light, 
lest their deeds should be reproved.' But let anything 
occur to touch a man's soul to the quick, and this sense 
of sin as found not only in deeds done, but in wrong 
moods of mind that have been cherished, will start into 
vigorous exercise. Then come frantic efforts to press it 
back and down and out of sight. Then come the con- 
trivances of folly to annul serious thought ; the teachings 
of a vain philosophy which would put on others the 
blame. What struggles to keep from being annoyed, 
disturbed and distressed by the restiveness of an awaking 
conscience ! Men shut their eyes naturally to what is 



148 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

unpleasant. They are like merchants who go from year 
to year without taking account of stock or posting their 
books — afraid of tiie result. Men tread lightly on thin ice. 
There is a fear in the case of many who get on easily 
for the most part, of seeing the truth that would rouse 
anxiety. Yet the manlier way is to face the full facts, 
and, through the help of God's grace, disarm them of 
their fear and destroy their power of condemnation." 

"And now," I continued, " here is the argument — that 
Christianity as a system recognizes this vital fact, and 
provides for it an actual historic propitiation in Christ. 
It proposes a forgiveness of sins, not as an arbitrary act 
of outright omnipotence, but by showing a moral reason 
in a very peculiar atonement for doing that thing. It 
makes not only legal but moral provision for rescue. It 
looks not only to relief from penalty, but to deliverance 
from moral entanglement. It is a system of intervention 
by service and sorrow. In a single word, Christianity 
proposes to meet fully and fairly this unfortunate and 
blameworthy state of things in the human soul. It not 
only presents a unique Christ, but brings out into promi- 
nence his unique work as the infinite reason for God's 
act in forgiving, and the corresponding reason for our 
faith in this divine way of salvation from both the pen- 
alty and the inveteracy of sin. A new element is intro- 
duced into the problem by this Christ. And it affects 
the whole moral order of things. It brings forward a 
new moral environment that displaces the old. We call 
this work " Christ's Atonement." And tlie object of it is 
best given, perhaps, in the words of the greatest Chris- 
tian thinker of the ages, the Apostle Paul, when he says 



THE FACT OF SIN. 149 

it is a system of things devised so ' that God might be just, 
and the justifier of him that believeth.' " 

He said : " That is your Christian doctrine of the 
atonement, so-called, is it not?" 

"Yes." 

*' But I have very serious objections to that particular 
doctrine." 

" Perhaps you have some better and more comprehen- 
sive theory of meeting the questions raised by this sin- 
consciousness, of which we have been talking to-day." 

" No, I have not much of a theory on any of these 
matters." 

He was weary. I said that we might take up the mat- 
ter of atonement at our next interview. And with a 
word or two of prayer I closed the visit. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE ATONEMENT. 

MR. B was not so well at our next interview. 
But his mind seems to grow more vigorous, and 
he confessed to a very deep and substantial interest in 
the questions we are discussing. He said: "To-day, we 
are to devote this hour to the subjeet of an atonement, 
and I would like to begin our talk by stating the objec- 
tions I have always had to the whole conception, as I 
understand it. It has always seemed to me a needless 
thing, an excrescence rather than an excellence to your 
Christian system." 

I interrupted him to say that " we were now agreed to 
look at any one thing in religion, any fact or doctrine 
whatsoever, as a part of a great whole ; so that, what all 
alone might seem needless, would appear very differently 
in its proper setting. The single stone might seem to be 
badly hewn by the workman because out of square, its 
upper sides a trifle wider than its lower. But when it is 
found that it was not intended to be a square block, but 
was slightly curved because it was proposed that it 
should fit into the span of an arch, the carelessness was 
seen to be carefulness, and the needlessness to be espe- 
cially needful. Any intellectual objection to atonement 
must give way if we find moral need for it. We were, in 
our discussion, to judge of everything from the moral 
standpoint. In view of the facts we had before us at the 
150 



THE ATONEMENT. 151 

last interview — the facts of a deep, broad, universal sin- 
consciousness, I urged that the ideas of atonement, pro- 
pitiation, redemption, and reconciliation, were at least 
relevant. Something of this kind was clearly demanded. 
In some form or other these or some similar facts were 
seen to be an absolute need. These were named as fur- 
nishing a natural necessary offset. In some such way, if 
ever, mankind must be delivered from the moral difficul- 
ties of its position. All hope of truth and right in reli- 
gion must go, if man was to continue to be the subject 
of what Mr. Huxley so justly calls man's ' endless illu- 
sions.' We need redemption of mind from the errors of 
false religions as well as redemption of soul from personal 
sin and its righteous retributions. We need not only 
deliverance from misfortune, but the merit of atonement 
over against the demerit of sin. When one makes the 
assertion that atonement, in some form, and in some of 
its elements, is not necessary amid such moral facts, he 
flies in the face of an almost universal conviction. The 
immense consensus of human thinking affirms that, either 
by oneself or one's substitute, either by one's own vows, 
prayers, repentances, reformations and virtues, or else by 
divine intervention, we must make or find some kind of 
an atonement." 

He said : " If we are going to define atonement so 
broadly as that, I can have no objection to conceding the 
idea as eminently just and proper. If we are to take it 
in the dictionary sense as meaning reparation in some 
way, all must admit the principle." 

I replied that reparation was only one of the many 
ideas involved in that word of immense breadth, the 



152 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

word " atonement " ; that we are now considering not 
the special fact of the Christian atonement, but the gen- 
eral idea denoted by the word itself Penalty is certainly 
owed to law, and if penalty for sin is to be escaped there 
must be reparation of some sort. If sin is personal 
wrong-doing in reference to a duty owed to a personal 
God, then reparation is due to him as really as to any 
man whose rights our wrong-doing has injured. Toward 
God, as the First Being in the universe, to whom we are 
indebted for life and all that life involves, we owe far 
more of duty, and that of a far higher sort, than to hus- 
band or wife, than to neighbor or friend, than to the 
whole human race put together. Toward him, then, is 
done our greatest wrong. To him chiefly are due our 
amends. We owe him atonement, using now the word 
in its narrowest sense of reparation. However much in 
our acts we may have wronged others, the chief wrong 
therein was against God, and the chief reparation is due 
to him. 

He said : " Men do not think about God when they do 
wrong, but only of their own gratification." 

"Very true; and just there lies their sin, in that for- 
getfulness of God, when the remembrance of him should 
be the great undertone of every human life. If there 
were no God, the highest human duty would be self- 
gratification. But, when there is a God, and such a God, 
and we are so closely connected with him and under such 
immense obligations to him for all the blessings of life, 
and when we are so raised in faculty as to be capable of 
moral sympathy with him, for us to forget him, instead 
of an excuse, becomes an aggravation of our sin. What 



THE ATO>'EMENT. 153 

would you think of a family, all the grown children of 
which were wholly dependent upon a noble father for 
an elegant home, a bountiful table, and a thousand luxu- 
ries, but who, as he came out and went in before them 
every day, was never addressed or even mentioned by 
them, neither having his wishes regarded nor even being 
thought of by them? Is it less wrong for one not to 
think of God, nor speak of him reverently, nor speak to 
him prayerfully ? " 

He asked ; " Why, conceding that atonement, in the 
sense of reparation, is needed, — why may not a man make 
it himself by his repentance ? When my boy does wrong 
and comes to me and confesses it, I freely forgive him. 
Why may not God do the same?" 

"Well, there are circumstances in which repentance, 
considered as atonement, is enough. The case of your boy's 
penitence is one of them. But there are just as plainly 
circumstances where it is not only not enough, but where 
the repentance is not in the least degree a reparation. 
God would do as you do in the case of your son, if his 
only relation to you and to me was that of a Father. He 
will do the same when his other relations, which are just 
as real as that of Fatherhood, will permit him so to act. 
He does do the same when atonement removes the obsta- 
cles. Something hinders. If something did not hinder, 
not a man would be unforgiveu on earth at this instant. 
You concede that one thing — lack of penitence — can 
hinder God's forgiveness of our sins. That atonement, 
you think, is needed. And until that atonement is made, 
you find a hindrance. Very well ; it follows, then, that 
hindrance of some sort may exist. In point of fact, it 



154 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

requires but little thought to see that there may be many 
other hindrances. There may even be some hindrances 
that we do not know. God may see hindrances still, 
when all the obstacles visible to us are removed. Per- 
haps we could not even understand them were he to tell 
us of those he sees. At any rate, there must be hin- 
drances of a very grave nature, or the love of God might 
be relied upon that instantly and without any condition 
whatsoever on man's part, without even that penitential 
form of atonement for which you plead, every human 
soul would be instantly forgiven of God. We do know 
that, among many things which might be named, just law 
with its just penalty annexed, is a hindrance. No other 
century has so exalted the idea of law as has this nine- 
teenth century. It has enthroned law in nature. Modern 
science puts the law of the fact into a greater prominence 
than the fact itself. But why stop with physical law? 
Once the royalty of law is conceded, moral law must be 
admitted to the kingly place among laws. Law is on 
the throne ; this kind of law reigns sovereign over all 
laws. Law is always first. Even love is under law, or 
it would be lawless license. The king among laws is the 
law of right love — i. e., the law of loving the holy. Any 
other dominating law than this law of love — L e., love for 
holiness — would be horrible as the law to which all others 
do obeisance. God, as highest Lawgiver, as Sovereign in 
the realm of absolute right, has something to say about 
the fit reparation if the penalty is to be remitted. He 
has something to say about moral satisfaction and the 
justice that must never be forgotten in its inexorable 
requirements. No thoughtful man would be willing to 



THE ATONEMENT. 155 

receive ' forgiveness of sins ' from a God who had acted 
simply by almightiness, who had acted apart from right- 
eousness, who had acted outside of moral relations and 
duties ; nor could such a God bestow ' forgiveness of sins/ 
since he would himself be culpable. God is a Father, 
but he is also a *Holy Father'; and all just thought, 
especially all scientifically directed thought in our cen- 
turv, demands that emphasis shall be put upon law. But 
God is the maker of law and its administrator. 'The 
logical order of the universe,' cries one school of scientific 
thinkers. ' We must recognize a moral order in the 
universe,' cries another. God holds himself to law when 
a man thrusts his hand into the flame. That hand is 
burned, under law, though ' God is love.' God holds 
himself to law when, out at sea, some ship goes down, 
though the cry of the drowning mariners come up and 
appeals to his heart. It is better that he maintain the 
law than that he break the order and save the men. 
They perish, though ' God is love.' He is a Father ; he 
could — forgetting now, as we may for a moment, all moral 
considerations — send a miracle to save them. He does 
not. There are, then, hindrances to his exercise of 
Fatherhood. The relation of parent to child is indeed 
very real ; but it is not the only relation that God sus- 
tains to man. To argue from that relation alone, as some 
do about atonement, as some do about human sorrow here 
or hereafter, would be to prove that man cannot sufier 
sickness or be bereaved. Contrary to the facts all about 
us, it would be easy to argue from the divine Fatherhood 
alone that no man has ever died or will die. It might 
be urged that the Heavenly Father would never bring 



156 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

death to man, his child, nor allow it to be brought. It 
is plain that God holds other relations to us than the 
paternal, and that only as these are considered and their 
demand for satisfaction, for propitiation, or for some form 
of reparation, are met, can the paternal feeling have 
scope in the forgiveness of sin, and the salvation of man 
be secured. 

" Then, too, how many things there are for which 
repentance, considered as a reparation, can do no good. 
It cannot restore lost health to a man who has sinned 
against God's law in the body. It is right for him to 
repent; but it by no means restores lost years and a 
ruined constitution. Repentance does not snatch the 
dissipated man from the verge of the grave. It cannot 
repair the damage when a spendthrift has squandered 
his fortune. Repentance will not restore to life the father 
who went down dishonored to an untimely death because 
of a reckless child. The boy's repentance will not give 
him back the broken-hearted mother from the tomb. 
No more will the plea of repentance as a reparation avail 
at the bar of any court. It is one's duty to repent, but the 
point is that repentance is not a reparative atonement." 

" Then why repent at all ? " he asked, somewhat 
sharply. 

'' For other and very good reasons, of which I want to 
speak presently. But, now and here, the point is that, 
not in nature, or providence, or law, or medicine, or 
religion, does repentance make a reparative atonement." 

" Why not ? " said Mr. B ; " why not consider that, 

if a man starts out for right-doing, it will suffice, his 
right-doing being atonement enough? " 



THE ATONEMENT. 157 

" For the same reasons, in general, that were named 
just now, when considering the idea that repentance 
would atone. One must be perfectly right in his right- 
doing to come up to present duty. What then becomes 
of the past? We can no more gain overplus by doing 
than by repenting." 

"Are you not too mathematical and mechanical, in 
talking in that way about overplus and deficit ? '' he said. 

" Am I any more so than when talking about any 
other kind of law — say natural law, or civil law ? Law 
has always, and in every species of it, to do with equiva- 
lents, and measurements, and fulfillments, and satisfac- 
tions. Exactly as we are to repent, not for the purpose 
of making an atonement thereby, so we are to live rightly, 
but not to gain merit therefor. Christianity provides for 
* right living ' in the deepest, broadest, highest sense of 
that phrase ; showing as it does, the way to obtain what 
it calls a ' new heart.' And this new heart — z. e., new- 
heartedness toward God in view of the work of Christ 
for us, is the basis of right moral living. So that Chris- 
tianity in offering to us another kind of reparation than 
repentance, insists upon the fairness of a penitential 
atonement, and equally on the utter fruitlessness of our 
meritorious obedience to meet our mistaken and guilty 
past," 

" Then why not," he said, " have in the mercy of God 
an atonement — his general mercy outside of any such 
system as that of Christianity ? " 

" My dear Mr. B ," I said, " you have come at last 

to the region of thought where alone atonement is pos- 
sible — that of the divine mercy. But you greatly mistake 



158 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

the gravity of the situation when you think of the general 
rather than the special mercy of God as meeting the 
emergency. There are whole realms of God's universe 
in which there is no atonement, though God be merciful. 
There is no atonement in nature. There is none in provi- 
dence. Every mistake you make in the game of life is 
watched and made the most of by ' the invisible player 
who sits on the other side of the table.' There is no con- 
doning, no atoning, no forgiving. The unfailing eye 
watches every move and takes every advantage. There 
is nothing so pitiless as law. It goes right on revolving, 
no matter who is crushed as the wheel makes its round. 
It is love that makes law and stands by it. It is the 
mercy ot God which has given us a system of fixed laws 
in the natural and the moral world, so that men may 
have something on which to depend. There is exhibited 
in nature and in morals the mercy of a kind but just 
judge, who will be as merciful as possible in every decis- 
ion ; merciful toward the prisoner at his bar ; merciful 
in admitting to the utmost all extenuations, all favorable 
pleas, all possible reasons for kindliest judgments ; merci- 
ful in giving the lightest sentences ; merciful in deferring 
as long as possible the execution of the penalty ; merci- 
ful in that he feels often more keenly than the criminal 
the painfulness of the situation, and is more compassion- 
ate toward him than the man is toward himself But 
none of these forms of mercy step in between law and its 
penalty. None of them secure what you and I so much 
need, the forgiveness of sins. The general mercy of God 
has no way of meeting the case of a man who has done 
wrong. We want special mercy. ' God so loved the 



THE ATONEMENT. 159 

world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever 
believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting 
life.' It is not only reparation, — the idea you have owned, 
— and satisfaction to the moral craving of divine righte- 
ousness, but it is substitution." 

He quickly responded : " Now you name an element 
in the Christian atonement especially objectionable to 
me. I cannot believe in the dogma that character can 
be transferred or transfused ; that Christ's character can 
be transferred to us or ours to him, or that his person- 
ality can be put in any way into ours. Calvin's idea of 
the ' transferrence of merits,' and Osiander's idea of the 
'transfusion of the divine essence into man,' are both 
mere speculations to me. Each man stands or falls for 
himself. Any other view violates every conviction of 
personality and justice. This whole idea of treating an 
innocent man as if guilty, and then a guilty man as if 
innocent, is in every way objectionable." 

'' You forget," I said, " your old plea of heredity, used 
in our last conversation, as a reason for not holding men 
personally guilty of sin. That heredity is always a case 
of transferred character. We call it transmission. And 
though, in the case of parent and cliild the transmitting 
of the qualities and results of paternal conduct is not 
an atonement, yet no believer in heredity can claim that 
the transferrence of something from Christ to his fol- 
lowers is either impossible or contrary to just analogy. 
The best Christian thinking holds to substitution and 
transferrence — but not of character. A transferring of 
the results of character is what we see every day. And 
it is this which is claimed in Christianity. Penalty and 



160 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

blessing are alike transferable. Christ's sorrow and ser- 
vice in their results can be given to us. Every time a 
man gives a penny to a beggar, there is a transfer of the 
results of a man's toil to meet the needs of the mendi- 
cant. All forms of social and business life build themselves 
up about the idea of voluntary substitution of one thing for 
another, of transfer of results. In ihe transfer of the 
substituted penalty to Christ, the substituted person, no 
wrong is done to him, provided always he is a voluntary 
offering. And in any transfer to us of the blessings 
given to him for his obedience and suffering by his 
Father, there is no wrong done to us, provided there are 
the rigiiteous requirements of a penitent forsaking of sin 
and a compliance with the claims of right living. Who 
is harmed ? Not God. Not Christ. Not the interests 
of righteousness. Not the man made better by receiving, 
under these requirements, the results of Christ's righteous 
work for him. 

" But," I continued, " I am not satisfied merely to de- 
fend this idea of substitution from objection. I want to 
enter a claim in behalf of Christianity that we have here 
a most unique presentation. We have a substituted per- 
son who is a unique character, and also a substituted sor- 
row for the penalty due to sin. The person substituted is 
not only a unique being in that he is the Son of God and 
Son of man, but in that he is a holy substitute. The idea 
of vicarious substitution is inwrought in all the thinking 
of the ages. But the propitiations of tiie old nations 
often missed the idea of a holy propitiator. A wicked 
man suffering the penalty of his guilt is not making 
atonement for other sins. Only a spotless being, only 



THE ATONEMENT. 161 

the absolutely perfect Christ, the Son of God and Son 
of man, can so go beyond the bounds of personal duty as 
to secure atoning virtue for the remission of others' trans- 
gressions. So, too, the sorrow of the atoner must not be 
guilty sorrow. All the guilty sorrows of a guilty world 
have not the least degree of atoning grace in them. Not 
punishment for sin, but suffering for sin by a holy Christ, 
propitiates and reconciles. And we have in the Christ 
of Christianity not only a holy substituted personage, 
but we have also a holy substituted sorrow that God ac- 
cepts instead of that guilty sorrow which is the natural 
result of sin. Christianity differs, by the whole diameter 
of human thought, from every other system in its grasp 
of the atoning idea."' 

'• But,'" he said, with a good deal of energy, " this 
whole conception of salvation as purchased wiiii blood, I 
find utterly repulsive." 

"And yet your political salvation and mine has been 
blood-bought. Your freedom and mine has been pur- 
chased with the blood of heroic men in the days of the 
war. And you and I glory in the fact that our freedom 
is worth so much the more because of the blood shed for 
its maintenance. What the Bible says of the old cere- 
monies of Judaism can be said of our liberties : ' Almost 
all things are purged with blood.' You and I know full 
well that no good cause has ever succeeded except as 
men died for it. Not a worthy principle, not a single 
step in the world's advancement has there been, but 
through the laying down of life for it. And every- 
where else but in religion men glory in the fact that their 
greatest gains are made worthy, just in proportion to the 



162 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

blood, by the shedding of which those blessings have 
been secured. The sneer at Christianity that it is a 
' blood theology,' comes with poor grace from those who 
boast of a flag baptized in the blood of brave men. We 
build for our patriotic dead their deserved monuments, 
and we give them perpetual place in our hearts. Mr. 

B , you are a man too well informed to join in the 

sneer against a blood-bought redemption when even 
liberty itself, as you have read its story, has never 
achieved a success except as it has been redeemed from 
tyranny by the shedding of noble blood. We honor the 
martyrs of every great cause. We do the martys of 
liberty and of science no dishonor when we also claim 
that this self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the world' s 
redemption was one 'of nobler worth and richer blood 
than they.' And so far is this idea of life coming through 
death, and victory through blood, and blessing to others 
through individual sacrifice of life from being an un- 
usual thing, that the world is full of examples of it. 
For, though there has been but one transaction worthy 
of being called the atonement, some of these separate 
ideas which this atonement involves are universally 
recognized among men." 

I continued : " There is still another view of sacrifice 
and suffering in the Christian system. Not only is Jesus 
Christ a redeemer from penalty by a substituted sorrow, 
but he shows, by giving up life, that we, too, morally are 
to give up our worldly, unsynipathetic and so evil life, 
laying that life down, as he laid his life down. There is 
an example and an inspiration to self-surrender to God, 
even to the extremity of death. The shed blood of Christ 



THE ATONEMENT. 163 

means atonement before God, but it means at-one-ment 
with him. It means that a man takes God's sense of 
-what sin is as his own sense of it ; so that he is re- 
deemed from his old way of thinking and feeling about 
it. It means that, as God accepts Christ's sacrifice as an 
atonement, so, because of it, God will also accept our 
service of sacrifice — not indeed as an atonement, but as 
an act of gratitude bringing us into harmony with God 
through Jesus his Son. So that atonement is not a truth 
dead and embalmed for the creed, but a live truth pro- 
ducing a new and better life in the man who accepts it 
with his whole heart. Our salvation is thus a blood- 
bought thing, and our service is also blood-bought. 
Everywhere else men put honor on a cause, a truth that 
is sanctified by blood ; that fact being not a reproach but 
a boast and an exultation. The orator proclaims it on 
the natal day of our American Independence, and the 
poet sings of the flag baptized in blood ; and the survivors, 
on Decoration Day, put new wreaths on their comrades' 
graves who bought us anew the political blessings we 
enjoy, by shedding their blood on a hundred battle 
fields." ' 

He seemed surprised at this presentation of the matter, 
saying that it was new to him. Presently he added : 
" The analogy is just. Atonement is not such an absurd 
thing as I had thought it. I shall never hear a man sneer- 
ing at a bloody theology without asking him ' how about 
blood-bought liberty ? '" A moment more and he added : 
" Yes, the Christ of Christianity is a nobler personage 
because he has shed his blood for his principles." 

I added. " And nobler still, in that he has shed his 



164 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

blood, not only for his principles, but for men, — for all 
men, — for yon and for me. And we need just that atone- 
ment. I do. I think you do, as well. For we want some 
broad, clear way of seeing that God righteously can for- 
give and save us." I added : " Let me pray, and will you 
join in spirit, if not in word, with me in the prayer, ' God 
be merciful to me a sinner.' " I knelt. He was visibly 
moved, and I commended him as well as myself to God's 
mercy in Jesus Christ. 



CHAPTER XII. 

REVELATION AGREEING WITH FACT. 

AT our next interview Mr. B said : " I have been 
thinking over your argument of these last few 
weeks with a good deal of interest. I see your aira. It 
is certainly a novel way of presenting the evidences of 
Christianity — novel to me. You are showing that the 
scheme which passes under that name is consistent with 
itself and with our human needs, and so that it ought to 
be true. Your plan gives me no chance at specific objec- 
tions. But it has this advantage for you," — he paused 
and then added, — " and for me, also, that we can study 
the system as a whole. And I am free to say that a good 
many of my general objections have been met. Perhaps 
I ought also to say I have seen the spirit of the system ; 
and I am coming to admit that some difficulties about 
specific doctrines and facts appear in a wholly new light. 
They are carried by the scheme as a whole. One or two 
of them are advantages rather than disadvantages. I am 
getting to see the scope and aim of Christianity. To use 
your figure, it looks more and more as if the key fitted 
the lock. I am willing to concede that it is this or it is 
no religion. It is, for me, a pretty strong doctrinal 
Christianity, or none at all. The religion that can do us 
any good must come from God, and so will be likely to 
have in it some pretty strong things for us to believe. 
The truth is, I have always rejected the facts on which 

165 



166 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

the doctrines seemed to me to be founded, and so I have 
scouted the doctrines. But some of these doctrines come 
out of human needs, and others of them meet our human 
wants to a surprising degree. Christianity, if true, ac- 
counts for a good many things ; and, as a theory, it agrees 
well with them." 

I quoted Bushnell's words ; " Every hypothesis that 
gathers in, accommodates and assimilates all the facts of 
a subject, gives, in that one test, the most satisfactory 
and convincing evidence of its practical truth. The most 
difficult questions of science are determined in this man- 
ner. Here is a wide hypothesis of the world and the 
great problem of life, and sin, and supernatural redemp- 
tion, and Christ, and a Christly providence, and a di- 
vinely certified history, which liquidates these stupendous 
facts at issue between Christians and unbelievers, and 
gives a rational account of them. The points of detail 
are intelligible only in a way of comprehension, or as 
being seen in the whole to which they are subordinate.*' 

He said : " You have taken the method suggested by 
Bushnell, in your argument. But if it be as he says, why 
cannot we have a Christianity with some of its miraculous 
elements left out? I begin to think I could accept Chris- 
tianity with those features eliminated. Cannot we regard 
it as true apart from miracles ? " 

I said : " I am afraid we cannot do that. I am not 
sure that, when it comes to a closer examination, you 
will want to do it. As the doctrines have changed their 
faces, and smile on you where they used to frown, so, I 
am fairly sure, it will be when we get down close to the 
facts of this religion. I think you will not want your 



REVELATION AGEEEING WITH FACT. 167 

Hamlet with Hamlet left out. I think you will require 
these supernatural facts. The system would be full of 
gaps without them. You would be ready to object to it 
as sadly lacking, if we could eliminate them. I will not 
sav it would be lacking in proof without them, for I do 
not hold them so much to be the proofs of the system as 
its natural expression. They are less root, and more 
blossom and fruitage. Miracles are less basal, and more 
the natural development of Christianity. They are so 
far evidences of it, as they show themselves to be a part 
of it. They are less proofs, than manifestations of it. 
They are not so much ' evidences of Christianity,' as they 
are exhibitions, in physical fact, of its inward spirit. Mira- 
cles are doctrinal teachings in physical expression. They 
are the words of Jesus recast in material facts. Jesus 
Christ, if he was the being claimed by Ciiristianity, and 
was here on his alleged mission, must sometimes have 
used miracles. They would burst through and * show forth 
his glory,' just as a plant in which there are imprisoned 
all the qualities and colors that make up the flower, must 
burst into blossom in spring time. For him not to use 
miracles sometimes is as incredible as for him never to 
use words." 

" But there is so much that is falsely claimed as mirac- 
ulous in the world." 

" True," I said, " but I want you to see on close exam- 
ination that this peculiar religion has its own kind of 
miracle. I want you to see the ' setting ' of these mir- 
acles, in tlie teaching that always accompanied them, 
that always demanded them, that was always illustrated 
by them, and that makes them possible with God and 



168 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

credible with man. This kind of religion has this kind 
of miracle. It is always in harmony with time and place, 
with worker and audience, with conditions and environ- 
ments. Not one of these could exchange places with any 
other. A miracle of the third year of Christ could 
hardly occur in the first year. They are timed. They 
are assorted in character. They are in harmony with 
the exact points of Christ's developments of truth where 
they occur. Their occasion is their justification. Seeing 
them as they are becomes their proof. They are an in- 
tellectual and moral necessity, when seen where they 
were wrought, and when one sees what end they serve. 
And the New Testament record of them is exactly in 
accord with what now we can see ought to have occurred. 
Something like these events must needs be in the career 
of a Christ. They become him. Their absence from the 
record would be a suspicious circumstance. We should 
know that something of this sort would occur, and we 
should wonder why they were omitted from the Gospels. 
For such things, at such a time, and in such a career, 
and under such circumstances, would be both natural 
and necessary. They would spring spontaneously into 
being, in such a work as that which such a Christ came 
to perform. 

" Now let us come to close quarters about these New 
Testament miracles. And I begin by saying that a 
supernatural personage, like the one claimed by Chris- 
tianity for its Christ, ought to be expected to do some 
such miracles as these recorded in the Gospels. If this 
New Testament is not the record of them, where shall we 
find the story of the occurrences we have a right to ex- 



REVELATION AGREEING WITH FACT. 169 

pect? Granted, as we have both done, the need of a 
supernatural person to rid us of the ' endless illusions ' 
of religious mistal^e, and from the guilt of human sin 
— some such miracles as these from his hand are mat- 
ters of course. And I do not see how, granting the need 
of a supernatural person, one can logically object to his 
supernatural actions. I am going to let you select some 
of the alleged miracles of Jesus, and we will examine 
them together as closely as you wish." 

He responded instantly by saying there was no doubt 
where the chief trouble was for men in his position He 
said : " My difficulties are in the story of Christ's birth, 
and equally in the story of his resurrection. Show me 
that these are fairly credible, and I am ready to admit 
any other miraculous thing claimed as occurring between 
the two." A moment after he added : " But this calls, 
as a preliminary question, for proof of the inspiration of 
the Bible, which is the source of our knowledge of the 
two allegations." 

" Begging your pardon," I replied, " I must take issue 
with you there. I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, 
but these two facts would be exactly the same if the 
Bible were not inspired. All we want for our purposes 
now in this discussion is a fairly credible book ; that pre- 
cisely the same credence be given to its statements as to 
any other historic narration. That whole matter of the 
credibility of historic evidence, we have gone over in a 
previous interview ; and we do not need to open it at all 
to-day. For certain other purposes the inspiration of 
the Scriptures is of very great importance. But in set- 
tling these two facts, we can dismiss it entirely. What 



170 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

we want here is simply good, honest, credible statements 
of contemporary historians, giving us a fair record of 
things about which they had knowledge in their day." 

He said : "Well, taking the thing as it is usually held 
by Christians, there is about Christ's birth a mystery. 
Here is a child that had no human father, but only a 
human mother, and that mother a virgin. The story 
seems not only incredible, but there is a mythical air about 
it, a mediaeval flavor to it. There is an air of unreality 
about the whole thing. There is the angel announcing 
it, and other angels who come to the shepherds — the 
whole thing has an improbable atmosphere. It is re- 
moved by its whole character from the sphere of sober 
history. If I were a defender of Christianity I should 
want to rid it of that incubus. I would drop out those 
circumstances that are so unnatural even to grotesque- 
ness. But, then," he added after a moment, " I do not 
see how you can do it, and yet retain any reverence for 
the Bible. Christianity seems to me to be handicapped 
by that story." 

"Yes," I said, "Christianity does stand or fall with 
the story of the birth, and that of the resurrection. 
And so far from wanting to drop out the peculiar birth, 
if I can only get you to see it through the right moral 
atmosphere — and no fact can be truly seen apart from 
its own atmosphere — I shall have you rejoicing at the 
historical incarnation as a great moral fact. For, though 
the outward part of the fact is of a material sort, the 
fact is a moral one. When a man sees it externally and 
outside of all its real relations and apart from its true 
environments, it appears to be incredible. Nor do I 



EEVELATION AGEEEING WITH FACT. 171 

wonder that, taken entirely out of its connections, it 
looks as it does to you. Our work is to get for the fact 
its own moral environment ; to surround it by its true 
and vital atmosphere ; to see the things it matches, not 
only historically, but intellectually and morally ; to find, 
if we can, the need of it, and the purpose it serves, alike 
in the great world history and in that of individual 
souls. 

" Let us start with the truth we have conceded all 
along, the need of some such personage as Jesus Christ, 
Son of God and Son of man, if we are to get any certainty 
in religion ; any mental or moral salvation for the race or 
for the man ; if we are to get rid of these ' endless illu- 
sions ' in religious beliefs. He must be a supernatural 
person. A perfect man he must be, as we have seen 
before ; and we must remember what that involves for a 
man in a sinning race, viz., another and a divine nature 
conjoined with the human. No other key fits the lock. 
But how is this supernatural and yet natural person to 
get among us men? Why object to the idea that a super- 
natural being should come to us in a supernatural way ? " 

He said : " You miss the point of my difiiculty. I 
object to the story of the hirth. If such a being is to 
appear, why not have him come suddenly in dignity, and 
in all dignity depart when his work is done ? The story 
is too human, with a kind of fantastic and mediaeval 
humanness, for this nineteenth century easily to credit. 
It seems as if this story of the birth was a kind of myth 
that after centuries might have hung about the real 
Jesus." He added soon, "I have no proof of this, and 
yet I frankly tell you just how it seems to me." 



172 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

"Thanks for your frankness," I said, " but how would 
it do to go through human history in that ad captandum 
style and meet in that way any one of its facts — especially 
a fact like this one that has given its date to the cen- 
turies, and changed the whole course of human thinking 
and acting?" He admitted that he had no proof for 
his suggestion, and that such a method of dealing with 
secular facts was not to be considered for a moment. 
" Then why let such a suggestion have force enough even 
to be mentioned here?" 

" Simply because we have in this Christ a supernatural 
being." 

" Very well, then. Let us remember that mystery is 
to be expected in the advent of a mysterious being. Let 
us keep ourselves in the moral atmosphere of things 
while we study the physical manifestation of a moral 
fact. We are asking about the probabilities that such a 
person will come into the race in some such way as the 
Gospels allege. Now, what if we find that this kind of 
mysterious birth is exactly befitting the commencement of 
such a career as that depicted in the Gospels. The story 
is fitly introduced by the birth. Of course, the narrative 
would be utterly unbefitting an ordinary child. But 
this is no ordinary child. Here is the problem : Wanted ; 
in some suitable way, God, incarnate in humanity. 
Wanted ; one who should be the God-man, one in the 
race-bond with us. Is there any more reasonable way, 
any more credible, any better way, for the accomplish- 
ment of this than that claimed for Jesus in the Gospels ? 
Had he been sent as an angel, he could not have met our 
needs. Nor could he as a newly created man. The 



REVELATION AGREEING WITH FACT. 173 

needed one must be a member of our race. The Christ 
for us must come into our race in one way only — by birth. 
For the race is no less one than each man is one. We 
are feeling, through the race-bond, the sad influence of 
heredity. The trouble, through this heredity, runs back 
to some Adam, presumably our Adam of the Bible. 
There is certainly an evil inheritance of suffering, through 
each man's connection with the race. Disease of body is 
certainly a fact. Your sickness, my dear sir, is not due 
to yourself Your particular disease is hereditary. It 
comes on you through others. You are sick through 
inherited bodily taint. That fact admitted, no thought- 
ful man can object to the parallel facts, the companion 
facts of intellectual and moral heredity. The acceptance 
of the one is the acceptance, logically, of the others. 
Indeed, we may say that the bodily heredity of suffering, 
for the body is only the smallest part of our inheritance 
of trouble. The root of all is sin of soul ; and in the 
moral domain the mischief is mainly evident. The body 
is only the sympathetic instrument of the ' me within.' 
Thousands, tryiug to be better men, have felt this inward 
drift of a sinning nature. A power within has held them 
back and down. They have been inwardly hindered from 
following the higher and the nobler." 

He hastened to say : " I believe that. I believe in an 
evil heredity. It is the worst foe of many a man, — per- 
haps of every man." He added after a moment : " It is 
a bad plight we men are in." 

" Yes, and the cure must come as came the disease, by 
some person entering the race with an elevating power 
as an offset to the power of the depravity that came from 



174 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

some Adam — presumably our biblical Adam. Our human 
nature must be taken on and lifted up by the Holy One 
of God. Downward the first Adam carries us, as we 
yield to sin — every sin being a sin ' after the similitude 
of Adam's transgression.' The second Adam, the Lord 
from heaven, lifts us, as we take hold of all righteousness 
through his Spirit.'"' 

I added: '"You see that in some such way as this, it 
must come, if salvation mentally and morally comes at 
all. And when we turn from the region of theory to the 
New Testament story of Christ's birth, we have another 
of these instances in which the key fits the lock. A 
Scripture writer claims for our Christ that he took not on 
him the nature of angels, but of the seed of Abraham. 
The Christ that meets our case must not only come by 
the way of birth into the race, but he must be a person 
with an individual consciousness. He must be a single 
and separate person ' like unto his brethren ' of the race ; 
a partaker of our common nature, and yet, as we are 
distinct beings, so it must be with the ideal Christ, and 
so it is with the actual Christ of the Gospels. He must 
be in the race and of the race. And all this is just the 
scientific doctrine of heredity conjoined with that of 
personality, and the demand is met perfectly in the Christ 
of Christianity. Further, it is humanity conjoined with 
divinity that we need, and which the religion of Christ 
claims to furnish. 

" To all this there is one usual answer, ' It is mysteri- 
ous.' Of course it is. That is the claim. As well object 
to the truth that it is true, as to the myterious that there 
is mystery about it. There ought to be mystery when 



REVELATION AGREEING WITH FACT. 175 

we consider the human need. There is when we consider 
the way in which the need is met. Nothing else, having 
the name of a religion, claims anything of this sort. It 
is this or it is nothing. It is this happy solution, or man 
is necessarily the sport of ' endless illusions,' and is hope- 
lessly involved in the consequential penalties of sin. A 
human birth of the world's Kedeemer, a superhuman 
birth for a superhuman Redeemer, an incarnation in 
humanity of God — this is the wisdom of God and the love 
of God in profoundest expression. Take it all in all, 
was the announcement to the virgin mother out of har- 
mony wiih the event announced? Who better to be 
selected than this modest maiden, in a holy household, 
descended from the royal line, her heart so imbued with 
religion that she breaks forth into a song that takes up 
the best strains of Hebrew poetry, interpreting them 
with a marvelous insight and spirituality ? "Where 'bet- 
ter to have the Christ born than in Palestine, the coveted 
land of all the older nations, fronting by its position the 
three continents of the world, and skirting the shores of 
that Mediterranean Sea, about which all ancient history 
gathers itself? What time in the world's history so 
favorable to the testing of its truthfulness as that Augus- 
tan age, when ' the science of evidence ' was as well de- 
veloped as it is to-day? It was not a credulous age. It 
was preceded by credulity. It was followed by a credu- 
lous time. But that age was incredulous in tone, even 
to scepticism. The gods and goddesses had fallen in the 
popular estimation. There was Sadduceeism with its 
doubts about the supernatural, and Phariseeism with its 
absorption in ceremonies and its satisfaction with the 



176 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

mere moralities of its religion. Predisposition to believe 
in this birth of Christ there was none. It was the last 
thing to be invented, the least credible of things to be 
believed. Yet it obtained for itself credit, in that land, 
in that age, among those men. The detailed account of 
the evangelists serves two purposes. It shows the im- 
portance they attached to this supernatural introduction 
into the world of a supernatural person. It shows also, 
in its careful recital of the circumstances connected with 
the birth, their simple honesty of record. The details carry 
with them the air of absolute history. The circumstances 
all help the event, and are in simple dignified harmony 
with it. The historical and the moral not only match each 
other, but they meet and mingle ; and you cannot omit 
a recorded detail without absolute loss to the whole im- 
pression of the fact. In some way this mysterious being 
came into the world. Coming in any other way he would 
be a failure. Not an atom of proof that he came in any 
other way has ever been furnished. It would have been 
easy to show the essential falsity of the story, could that 
have been done. It would have been done had that been 
possible. It was a story instantly declared. In those 
*oral gospels,' in which the story was told over and over 
again by the accredited disciples, it must have been 
given. The Orientals to this day tell the Koran story, 
though the story tellers often cannot read a word of that 
book, with the most marvelous exactness. These dis- 
ciples told it as Homer's story was told by the Greek 
minstrels. These oral recitals preceded by a few years the 
written Gospels. For that oral metliod was the method 
of the time. In those ' recitals,' so careful, so exact, great 



REVELATION AGREEING WITH FACT. 177 

Stress would be put on this mysterious birth. For in- 
stant inquiry would be made as to who he was, and when 
and where born, and what circumstances attended his 
birth. Enemies as well as friends would ask these ques- 
tions, and any silence, any hesitation, any discrepancy 
here, would be fatal. To show that the facts were other- 
wise than stated, was the easiest way to destroy the new 
religion. It would only be necessary to show that the 
child was born in no remarkable way, under none other 
than ordinary circumstances. Nothing of the kind was 
ever done. For if done, the story of it would have lived. 
And when, to keep enemies from perverting the life of 
the Lord, the oral gospel was committed to writing, it 
would have been impossible to insert any circumstance 
about that birth in the well-known story without raising 
the cry of fraud among the enemies of the faith. Nor 
was there time for the least myth to gather around the 
story of a common man's birth — not now to urge that the 
birth introduced into life no common man. Myths take 
time, and time between the oral and the written Gospels 
was wanting ; nor could a myth have been inserted any 
more than you could insert one to-day without instant de- 
tection and exposure. The honest virgin mother holds 
'these things in her heart' until after his death. She tells 
the facts. From her lips they repeat it, possibly they make 
written note of it. They give her version over and over 
again. They do exactly as did the Greek singers, who 
without a manuscript, but only by the hearing of the 
car, sang songs that have come down to us, in which a 
single misplaced word or one wrong accent would have 
been detected in a moment." 

M 



178 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

He said : " I see that fraud or misstatement by others 
would have been impossible. But the whole story of 
anything miraculous about the birth depends on Mary's 
assertion." 

"And who should better know about her child than 
the child's own mother ? And in the Gospels she is by 
no means alone. There is Joseph, her reputed husband, 
who knew all about the story and clung to her. There 
are Elisabeth her relative, and Simeon and Anna of the 
temple. There are the genealogical tables as to the royal 
descent. There are the facts of the subsequent life fitly 
introduced by such a birth. There is the uncontradicted 
testimony of men who knew him, knew his mother, 
knew those who were close to her, and who, all the days 
of her life, gave her a home in their own households. 
The wise men knew whether they did or did not come to 
his manger. The people knew whether there was or was 
not, as oral and written gospels said, a massacre at Beth- 
lehem, and whether the wise men did or did not return 
to Herod. The hearers of this gospel story of the birth 
knew whether the written and the spoken story agreed 
each with the other ; they also knew whether there was 
or was not a man, who, doing these open wonders^ came 
among men in a wonderful way. The simple, straight- 
forward story, moving right on with calm, easy flow, tells 
of mysterious as well as ordinary things, and the inci- 
dents of the birth bear traces of the same hand in their 
record as does the story of the wonderful life. It fits 
with all the rest we know about him. It agrees with the 
idea elsewhere gained of him. There is no intrusion, no 
excrescence about it. It becomes the subsequent life. 



REVELATION AGREEING WITH FACT. 179 

It fits the ideal. It fits the need. It fits them both. It 
stands historically related. It is morally needful and 
divinely eloquent as a testimony of God. It ought to be 
true. It is true. All before and after demands it, and 
confirms it. There were a hiatus in history without it. 
The key fits the very intricate wards of the lock. These 
combinations are as wonderful as are the facts them- 
selves. Have I not, my dear sir, a right to ask your 
acceptance of them, and of this record of them in the 
Bible ? " 

He waited some time before answering my direct ques- 
tion. Slowly and very deliberately he said : " You are 
asking a good deal from me. I foresee that conceding 
this, I shall be obliged to go on and concede a good deal 
more. It is certainly very singular that the whole mat- 
ter should have so changed front to me within the last 
few weeks. The thing is wholly unlike what I thought 
it to be. It begins to seem not only reasonable, but 
right — right that there should be attention to such 
claims. I would not quite like to say that I do really 
concede the question. But I do find a great change in 
my feelings toward Christianity." 

• I said : " Why do you use the word ' concede,' as though 
there was a grudging assent to an unwelcome truth ? It 
is the gladdest possible truth, if true at all. I am as 
much interested to have it true as you are, and you as I. 
We both ought to hope it is true that ' God so loved the 
world that he gave his only begotten Son.' We are pro- 
foundly interested to have this true." 

He said : " Through life I have felt just the other way. 
All my wish has been to find it untrue." 



180 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

"But why SO?" 

" I cannot tell ; but I have always been hospitable to 
objections. Anything that looked like a difficulty 1 have 
welcomed. I have felt as if Chri$=tianity was trying to 
prove something against us, rather than, as now I see it, 
to do something for us. I had no right to make that 
mistake." 

It was time for the interview to close, and commending 
him once more to God in a few words of prayer, I left 
him. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE NEW LIFE. 

MR. B was to-day in a peculiar mood. He 
pointed to a newly purchased Bible on his table, 
and said : " I sent out and bought a serviceable copy. I 
had a ' Triglot Evangelist, Interlinear ' — Greek, Latin 
and English, — which covered the four Gospels, but no 
complete copy of the New Testament." Seeing my look 
of surprise, he added, " Wife and the children have their 
copies. I haven't owned, for myself, a complete New 
Testament, until within a week." 

I could not help saying, '•' Is that fair ? " 

" No," he answered. '• I've taken what I know about 
the Bible at second hand. I obtained this copy, how- 
ever, not for purposes of controversy. I wanted to see if 
the key fits the lock. But " — in a hesitating way — ''' I 
hardly know where to begin." 

I advised him to obtain a broad view of the teachings 
of Jesus by a rapid reading of the Gospel of Mark. He 
could read it in a couple of hours. It would give him a 
comprehensive view of the relations of one part with 
another of Christ's career, and his progressive revelations 
of the truth about God's kingdom. He took his Bible, 
turned down a leaf at Mark's Gospel, and promised the hasty 
reading I had advised. Reading it now in the new moral 
atmosphere in which he was coming to see Christianity, 
he would find it, I told him, not only a new book, but 

181 



182 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

there would be a growing belief that Jesus was an actual 
person, a supernatural being, who meets exactly our 
needs as Teacher and Saviour; furthermore, he would 
find an increasing proof, not only of the trustworthiness, 
but of the inspiration of the record. He would feel 
its fitness, and find himself assuming its absolute truth- 
fulness, as almost self-evident. There was no other such 
proof of the Bible as the Bible itself. It was its own 
best argument, studied honestly, and in the moral atmos- 
phei'e it engendered. 

He said : " Let me add one qualification, viz., that a 
man shall have moral earnestness — a mood of mind that 
men do not always possess. If I were not somewhat in 
that mood, I should not ask you to defer the subject of 
to-day's conversation. I see " — looking at some notes I 
had on a sheet of paper — " that you are ready to take up 
Christ's resurrection, as our theme. But I want you to 
postpone that matter to-day, and help me get at the 
teachings of Christ on one or two subjects." 

On indicating my willingness so to do, he stopped a 
few moments as if in great embarrassment. At length, as 
he saw that I waited for him, he said : " Nothing that 
we have talked over more impresses me than this moral 
side of the subject. When we began these conversations 
it was not so. To me the object was argument, largely 
to beguile the tedium of these hours of enforced confine- 
ment in the house. As we have gone on, it would be too 
much, perhaps, to say that your views have converted 
me from all my former opinions — if indeed I had any 
views worthy of being called opinions, on so serious a 
matter. I certainly had no convictions on the subject 



THE NEW LIFE. 183 

except that I was thoroughly opposed to any one else 
having any intellectual right to positive convictions. 
But I have certainly come now to feel that instead of 
sneering at men's errors and sins, we men are in a very 
bad plight. J feel more like commiserating men and 
pitying them. It is not a matter for sneering. I confess 
to a degree of moral earnestness about these questions. 
When you began to use that phrase ' moral earnestness/ 
I thought it a kind of religious cant. But it is just the 
right phrase. Certain great questions are pressing on 
me now, and I want to know how Jesus answered them. 
And I have sent out and gotten this Bible so as to put 
my own finger on his words about these things. I have 
very little skill in finding what I might want ; and per- 
haps you can help me to the exact utterances of Jesus 
Christ on these questions." 

I told him that I was at his service in searching for the 
verses. Taking a slip of paper from his table he read as 
follows : '•' What does Jesus sny about our entanglement, 
and about getting out of it ? "' " What does he say about 
forgiveness of sins ? " " What about the world beyond ? " 

He began on the first of his topics by remarking : " I 
believe in evil heredity and in evil environment. I be- 
lieve we are all tangled up in the thick meshes of this 
net. And I see no way of getting out of it. We are 
self-doomed. The thing is not only on us but in us. The 
way out — that is the question — if there is, indeed, a way 
out. We seem to be imprisoned in ourselves as well as 
in our situation ; and there is no escape." 

He stopped, and a spasm of pain contorted his features. 
I rose to do what I could to relieve him, and oflfered to 



184 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC, 

send in his attendant, and take my own leave. He would 
listen to neither. Would I wait a few minutes ; his spasm 
would pass and he would be as well as usual. He leaned 
back wearily in his chair, and I allowed him to rest as 
long as he wished. 

He resumed the conversation by saying : "You see 
my disease furnislies a good illustration of what I mean. 
I have to sit and take it. It is on, and it is in me. In 
the sarue way, I think, we are all entangled in error and 
wrong, and what I want to know is whether there is any 
way of getting out of this evil environment and heredity. 
If some one would get me out of this bodily doom, I would 
be glad. But I fear there is no chance of that." 

I said : " We were going to-day to talk of Christ's res- 
urrection, with some reference also to our own, when we 
are to have the perfect body. But you wished to discuss 
another theme. We have that in reserve." 

He said : " I have sometimes thought that if Christ 
had any help for men's souls he would first help men's 
bodies.'' 

To which I responded : " That is just what he did in 
the" miracles recorded in the Gospels. He did just what 
you see he ought, in your conception of him, to do. 
Please remember that concession of yours when we come 
to examine the New Testament miracles. Meanwhile, let 
us remember that the historic order for the race would 
be death preceding a new and perfect resurrection-body. 
Christ's healings showed power and gave hints mean- 
while. That was all he could do historically at that 
time. Now, in these centuries, man's chief trouble is not 
physical but moral ailment. You are right in asking 



THE KEW LIFE. 185 

whether there is any way of getting out of the moral 
entanglement, and so in the end, of gaining a better life 
for both soul and body. I believe heredity along the 
line of ill can be matched by heredity of an opposite 
kind, and environments of evil by a new and holy envi- 
ronment. I want to read to you — or, rather let you read 
for yourself — what Jesus said on that matter." I put 
into his hand his Bible, open at John's Gospel, third chap- 
ter, the third verse, and asked him to read it slowly and 
carefully aloud, and to think while reading it that he had 
in those words Christ's answer to him on that question. 
He read distinctly, pausing at each clause, the words : 
" Jesus answered and said unto him. Verily, verily, I say 
unto thee. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the 
kingdom of God." He looked at the marginal refer- 
ence, and then substituting the words " from above " for 
the word " again," he read the text thus : " Except a 
man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of 
God." He seemed to ponder the words a moment, and 
then made this one word of comment, " Mysterious ! " 

" Precisely so," I said, •' and that is what the auditor 
of Jesus said, nineteen hundred years ago. Please read 
the next verse." He read : " Nicodemus saith unto him, 
How can a man be born when he is old ? " Kead also 
the eighth verse. He read : " The wind bloweth where it 
listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not 
tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth : so is every 
one that is born of the Spirit." 

He said : " This does not tell us what it is, but only 
that it is. The words ' born again ' and ' born from 
above ' must be a figure of speech. 



186 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

*•' You are saying again," I replied, " what Christ's 
auditor said. In one sense all our religious and moral 
words are figures of speech. For they are all derived 
from physical things. Our word ' soul ' meant the 
' breath ' ; but since what breathes lives, it came to mean 
the physical life of the body ; and since, when we have 
bodily life, there is an inner life of thought and feeling, 
the word 'soul' came at length to denote the spiritual 
nature in man. It is the same with our word ' heaven,' 
meaning at first ' the heaved up,' and as the sky seems 
heaved up over the earth, it meant the firmament ; and 
as, morally, we think of the home of God and the holy as 
above us, so we call the holy, happy world by the nanie 
of ' heaven.' Such words lose their physical in their 
moral and technical sense. And so the term ^ born 
again ' or 'regeneration ' has as definite a use in religion as 
has the word ' gravitation ' in the realm of nature. But 
we can see how the old meaning still abides in the newly 
used term, ' regeneration.' When we were born, a new 
being was ushered into a new world. These new lungs 
first breathed in a new atmosphere." 

I paused, for I saw he was doing his own thinking, 
and not following my thought. At length he said : " I 
thought these words of Christ were quoted as proof of 
your religious doctrine of a 'change of heart.' But I do 
not so understand Christ in them." I said : " They are 
not interpreted correctly when so used. The idea is not 
change but newness. They declare that a new principle 
of moral life begins its existence amid the faculties of 
the soul, and uses them for its ends — very much as what 
we term ' the vital force ' uses this organism of the body. 



THE NEW LIFE. 187 

A new kind of moral life is in some way engendered in 
the soul. We start in a new heredity. For this life 
begins when the soul uses its immense faculty of trusting 
one higher than itself, Jesus Christ. This same chapter 
— the third of John — tells us how Jesus would have Nic- 
odemus enter, by this new spiritual birth, into the king- 
dom of God. Will you also read aloud verses sixth, 
fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth?"' He read very 
deliberately as follows : " That which is born of the 
flesh is flesh; and that which k born of the Spirit is 
spirit. ... As Moses lifted up the serpent in the 
wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up : 
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but 
have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he 
gave his only begotten Sou, that whosoever believeth in 
him should not perish, but have everlasting life." 

" You will notice," I continued, " that the beginning 
is the Holy Spirit of God. We are ' born of the Spirit.' 
The method, so far as we in our freedom act, is by 
' believing ' — i. e., the influential faith of the heart. We 
thus, at the moment of the soul's profound trusting in 
this Saviour, are regenerated by this Spirit of God, born 
into the new heredity. We become, morally, members of 
a new kingdom, ' the kingdom of God.' The new-born 
man begins to breathe in the new atmosphere of new 
moral fact. These gospel truths are the new environ- 
ment for the new life begun in the soul." 

He remarked : " For the first time in my life the 
doctrine of Jesus Christ about the new birth seems rea- 
sonable and right. When I add to the fact of the neces- 
sity of something of this sort, the fact that Jesus said 



188 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

just these words about a new kind of life, the thing 
wears a new aspect to me. It implies, however, a good 
deal which one rather hesitates to admit, viz., that we 
have a hard, dead central spot in our souls that needs this 
newly given life." 

" How else can you account for the facts of man's 
moral history ? By his reason and conscience drawn 
toward acknowledging God, and by some other and some 
controlling power more central still, driven away from 
God, he needs down in this central soul a new life-spring, 
a better moral impulse, a new kinship of vital feeling — 
in short, he needs what the New Testament describes as 
a ' heart created anew in Jesus Christ.' On this point, I 
want you to see what Jesus himself says. Perhaps, you 
will read for me the tenth verse of the tenth chapter of 
John's Gospel." 

He read : " I am come that they might have life, and 
that they might have it more abundantly." He added, 
" I can see that this is what is wanted, new vitality, 
something within, to make a man alive to these things. 
I seem to see that it is so, but there is a further need. 
That gift of a new inward moral vitality is the great 
desideratum. It is mysterious to me, but it is a mystery 
in the ri^-ht direction. The truth evidentlv lies aloug that 
way. I am certainly getting a little moral light on these 
things." 

I asked him if he would turn to John's Gospel, the 
eighth chapter and twelfth verse. He did so, and read : 
" I am the light of the world ; he that f )lloweth me shall 
not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.^' 

He remarked, as if in a partial self-application of the 



THE NEW LIFE. 189 

words of Jesus, " I hardly see how I could follow him in 
my situation." 

To which I replied : " My dear sir, you are now con- 
sulting his word, and are ready to hear what he says and 
carefully weigh his meaning. Is not that, in so far, fol- 
lowing him ? " 

He replied that he had not thought of it in that way, 
but had been drawn along insensibly to consult the 
teachings of Christ. And I reminded him that it was 
exactly so with men when Christ was on earth. He drew 
men's attention by the wonderful words which proceeded 
out of his mouth. He is the life-giver as we give credit 
to his words, and there comes with this trust in him and 
his utterances, a kind of inward moral conviction that 
this is the true way. He has given us nothing to gratify 
our mere curiosity, but everything for our real inward life. 
As we trust more and more, with a kind of inner trustful- 
ness, yielding to him his place of teacher, we find a living 
satisfaction. We have hold of a safe and sure hand. Trust- 
ing him becomes a mental mood ; thus saving a man's 
intellect as well as his soul. A man gains an inward 
freedom, a kind of salvation from the bondage of those 
" endless illusions "' described by your friend, Mr. Huxley. 
"Please read two verses more. They are found in 
John's Gospel, the thirty-second and thirty-sixth verses 
of the eighth chapter." 

While he was finding them he said : "All your references 
to-day are to John's Gospel ; and yet you wanted me to 
read Mark. How is that ? I am a good deal inclined to 
read John in the rapid way you named." 

" By all means read John, if you feel inclined to do so. 



190 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

When you want to hear Jesus on the vital things of hia 
teaching — those which bring his words home to the soul's 
deepest needs — take John. But I still think that, for a 
general survey of the life of the Lord, for the purpose of 
seeing part as related to part, Mark would be better. 
But you have led the conversation into the most vital 
and spiritual truths of Christianity." 

He had found the verses, and he read : " Ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you free. ... If 
the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free 
indeed." 

I said : " Here is spiritual freedom because a man is 
free from his old self. His life is started from a new 
moral principle ; the soul taking fast hold of new facts 
and living by them. Those facts center in a personal 
Christ to whom this faith virtually joins us. One comes 
thus into the realm of trust, confidence, faith. It is 
equally a state of mind and a mood of heart. The newly 
given principle is vitally trustful in Jesus Christ as 
Teacher and Master and Saviour. And now one more 
reading. It is found in the First Epistle of John, the 
fifth chapter, the eleventh and twelfth verses." 

He found it and read : " God hath given to us eternal 
life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son 
hath life ; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not 
life." 

The words had an extraordinary efiect upon him. 
He looked them over very closely, as if they were new. 
Then he laid the Bible open at the words, on his lap, and 
a singular wistful look came into his face. I did not speak. 
In a few moments he took up his Bible and read aloud 



THE NEW LIFE. 191 

the words again. " That is so," he said, very emphaticaily. 
" Salvation is an inward life, and the life should be com- 
municated from another life, and the one who gives it 
should be some one such as the ' Son ' in this verse, and 
the man who has it can be spoken of as one who ' hath 
life.' I wish I felt certain who he really is." 

I remarked that, had we examined the miracles, 
especially that of the resurrection of Christ, as we had 
intended at this interview, he would be more certain as 
to who Christ is. I reminded him that he had wished to 
take the sul^ject now before us. But it might be true 
that the Holy Spirit, the existence of whom he had once 
said his Quaker blood inclined him to acknowledge, had 
guided us in the diversion by which we had discussed 
these vital themes to-day. 

He said that there was another question on his list, viz., 
the "forgiveness of sins." He recalled to my attention my 
former claim that this was a distinctively Christian doctrine. 
He asked how the alleged atonement of Christ procured 
sin's remission ? I frankly told him that I did not know. 
I only saw this, that God had, as shown by the atone- 
ment, considered the question of satisfaction, of substitu- 
tion, of what was a sufficient propitiation, of what would 
justify him in granting absolution. The suffering of one 
who himself deserved not to suffer, showed that God 
had considered the whole thing, and was satisfied on that 
account to forgive men on certain necessary conditions. 
Jesus did not himself use the word " atonement." He left 
that word to be used by one of those apostles whom he 
promised to " guide into all truth." It is the same with 
the word "justification," employed by Paul in formula- 



192 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

ting the Christian belief, under the guidance of the prom- 
ised Holy Spirit of God. I said, " I want you to read 
certain utterances of Christ — free utterances, given not 
in studied systematic form, — for he spake among plain 
men, declaring truth in the germ, which was afterward 
to be put into doctrinal phrase. Will you be good enough 
to read once more, this time from your Triglot, the four- 
teenth and fifteenth verses of the third chapter of John's 
Gospel?" 

He read : " As Moses lifted up the serpent in the 
wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up : 
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but 
have eternal life." I called his attention to the word 
" 7nust," in his Greek — i. e., deJ ; and that it has the force 
of a necessity, here of a moral necessity Because there 
was a need of the " lifting up " before another thing 
could be done, Christ was to die. The '• lifting up " of the 
serpent was done years before in the wilderness. And 
every Jew, to whom Christ's words should come, under- 
stood what was meant. The truth was couched in lan- 
guage drawn from historic rather than philosophic 
sources. Tlie **' lifting up " could only refer to Christ's 
death on the cross. And tliis lifting up was necessary 
morally. The other Greek word has the telic sense. 
"Must be lifted up " (jVa, that) — i. e., in order that — so that 
this end might be secured. Here is an atonement taught 
in other than formal and dogmatic language, — but un- 
mistakably taught. Satisfaction, substitution, transference 
of blessing, are all set forth in simple unprofessional 
words — words descriptive rather than definitive. Christ's 
dying is here put as the '' precedent conditional " of hu- 



THE NEW LIFE. 193 

man salvation. " Please read also Mark, tenth chapter 
and forty-fifth verse." 

He read : " The Son of Man came to give his life a 
ransom for many." "The word ransom, Ibxpov, you 
will remember, can mean nothing else than 'ransom- 
money ' — money paid too, by one to purchase another's 
deliverance. Its equivalent in the Old Testament is 
'satisfaction.' 'Ye shall take no satisfaction, Ibxpiv^, for 
the life of a murderer/ as we read in Numbers. In a 
popular translation of jEschylus it is given : ' What 
atonement, Ibrpoy, is there for blood ? ' Chryseis brings 
rich presents for the ' ransom ' or ' redemption ' of his 
daughter from the Greeks. In this same line of thought 
Jesus spoke in another verse, close to those you have 
read from the third chapter of John. Will you be so 
kind as to read the seventeenth verse ? " 

He read : " God sent his Son into the world that the 
world through him might be saved." " This verse," I 
said, "read in connection with the 'lifting up' and the 
' ransom ' and the ' giving of his life,' shows that salva- 
tion was vitally dependent upon the dying of Jesus 
Christ for others. And Peter's comment, after describing 
the death and resurrection of Jesus, is : ' God hath ex- 
alted him to give the forgiveness of sins ; ' and again, 
' by this man is preached unto you forgiveness of sins.' 
And Jesus himself said to a penitent, ' Thy sins are for- 
given thee.' I may not be able to see liow the holy 
suffering of the holy Sufferer suffices ; how God can be 
just and the justifier of him that believeth. But I can 
see that he has considered the matter. And if Christ's 
atonement satisfies him, so that he can righteously forgive 



194 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

sinners, that fact ought to satisfy you and me. I do 
assure you that millions of the human race have so taken 
it, and say with Paul, ' We have redemption through his 
blood, even the forgiveness of sins.' " 

He said : " I have one other point on which I want 
your assistance. I want to find what Jesus Christ said 
about the other world, and w^here to find the verses in 
which he speaks of it. It is immensely important to 
know all one can know about the future life." 

I told him that Jesus in his teaching was very definite. 
There was always the grand background of his second 
coming, the resurrection, the final judgment, and the two 
eternal states. That these ideas came out everywhere, 
in the most informal way, and often in the most casual 
conversation of Jesus. For instance, Christ spoke of 
heaven as a '' Paradise." It is the Oriental word for a 
pleasure garden. It is described in the Bible as a place 
where ''joy and gladness are found therein, thanksgiving 
and the voice of melody." Under this figure he sets 
forth the happy state of holy souls. He called it such to a 
poor prisoner at his side when he was dying. He de- 
scribed heaven, also, as a many-roomed mansion. " Will 
you read what he said in John's Gospel, the fourteenth 
chapter, at the first verse ? " 

He read: " In my Father's house are many mansions. 
. . . I go to prepare a place for you. ... I will 
come again and receive you unto myself." 

" The distinct personality of men after death is what 
he teaches, and also the companionship of sympathetic 
souls with himself So, too, elsewhere, he taught some 
who would have held that we do not continue to exist 



THE NEW LIFE. 195 

after we die, that ' God was not the God of the (non- 
existent) dead, but of the living' (dead). What Jesus 
taught about the resurrection of the body can better 
be considered when ayc take up the matter of his own 
resurrection. But it is enough now to say that 
the promise to those who would do certain things — 
* I will raise him up at the last day ' — is repeated three 
times in one chapter of John's Gospel ; showing how the 
thought of a resurrection was the familiar background 
of his daily teaching. So, too, Jesus put a day of final 
judgment after this resurrection day, for all the race. 
Please read what he says in John, fifth chapter, at the 
twenty-ninth verse." 

He read : " The hour is coming in the which all that 
are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come 
forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of 
life ; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection 

of damnation." Mr. B said : " This is too literal ! 

Can we not understand him to speak in a figurative way 
of some great national event ? " 

I replied: "You wanted to hear what Christ said. 
He was certainly speaking of literal things. I let you 
read his own literal words. He made familiar, I had 
almost said, daily reference to this judgment day. He 
spoke of it as ' that day.' ' Take heed least that day 
come upon you unawares.' ' Of that day knoweth no 
man.' ' It will be more tolerable for Sodom in that day.' 
Beyond 'that day,' will come the chief rewards of the 
righteous man, as he stands a perfected being, complete 
alike in body and soul. We read: 'Then shall the 
righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their 



196 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

Father.' Christ identifies himself forever with his fol- 
lowers. Will you read what he says in John, seventeenth 
chapter, the twenty-fourth verse?" 

He read : " Father, I will that they also, whom thou 
hast given me, be with me where I am ; that they may 
behold my giory, which thou hast given me." 

" Read also the twenty-third verse. " 

" I in them and thou in me." 

" Let me read a few more verses, for you are 
weary." I read from my own pocket Testament : '•' For 
the Father loveth you because ye believed that I came 
forth from God." " Whosoever shall confess me before 
men, him will I confess before my Father which is in 
heaven ; whosoever denieth me before men, him will I 
also deny before the angels of God." 

" But," I said, " I want you to read for yourself, one 
more declaration of Jesus Christ. It is in John, the 
sixth chapter, and at the forty-seventh verse. I want 
you to emphasize the word ' hath ' in it, and read it as if 
addressed to yourself" He read: "He that believeth 
on me hath everlastino^ life." 



CHAPTER XIV. 

PROVIDENCE AND FAITH. 

ON Mr. B 's table, at our next meeting were two 
books, his Bible and a copy of Browning. The 
latter was open at the poem "Cleon." As I took it up, I 
noticed that he had marked the famous passage in which 
Cleon, in response to the inquiry of the king, recites 
the list of his own achievements as poet and painter and 
artist, over against those of the king's kingcraft. He 
says that his art was less his own than the result of long 
ages of poetic and artistic development. Introducing the 
fine figure of the hollow sphere scantily filled with water, 
which touches first one part and then another of the inner 
surface as the globe is turned, while the air within touches 
always every part of it, Browning makes Cleon say : 

" The vulgar call first full 
Up to the visible night — and after void : 
Not knowing air's more hidden properties : 
And thus our souls, misknown, cried out to Zeus 
To vindicate his purpose in our life. 
"Why stay we on the earth unless to grow ? 
Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out, 
That he or other god, descended here, 
And, once for all, showed, simultaneously, 
"What in our nature never can he shown 
Piecemeal or in succession ; showed, I say. 
The worth, hoth absolute and relative. 
Of all his children from the birth of time. 
His instruments for his own appointed worJc.'^ 

197 



198 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

This last line he had underscored. He said ; " Last 
night I did not sleep much, and during the long hours 
this line kept going over and over in my mind : 

' His instruments for his own appointed work.' 

"Strangely, too, my knowledge, gained in boyhood, of 
the old biblical men, came back to me in connection 
with Browning's line. I seemed to see as never before, 
that there was a reason for their living. They were ' his 
instruments in his appointed work.' This was a new 
setting for me to give to their lives. They had parts 
assigned to them in God's great plan. It made a very 
different thing of their lives to me. I have had not a 
little sport over some of these stories. I used to say 
that these men were put on the biblical page for our 
imitation, and then I denounced the Bible as immoral. 
But I can see, now, that the reason for according them 
place in the history is not that they are primarily for 
either our imitation or our warning, but that it may be 
shown how they were, sometimes unconsciously, working 
as God's instruments, in unfolding his great plan. They 
are not held up so much as examples of virtue, as of men 
who served their part in the programme. There was that 
great, overgrown Samson, a man freakish and absurd 
enouorh, no doubt. But I can see how in a rude aa^e, 
such a man might be of use in hand to hand contests 
with the enemies of his country, and so that his life 
would work into the wide plan. And he quoted again 
the lines : 

'"The worth 

Of all his children from the birth of time, 

His instruments for his own appointed work.' " 



PEOVIDENCE AND FAITH. 199 

I remarked, as he paused for a moment, that I did not 
see how he could stop at the point of including men in 
the system of divine restoration ; that even those of our 
naturalists who call themselves agnostics, have admitted 
that there is " a moral order in the things of the uni- 
verse." " Are you," I said, " not obliged to go on and 
include in the plan a good many historical events, which, 
all alone, would be very objectionable ? If you take in 
the grotesque Samson, can you leave out the wars in 
which he was engaged ; can you leave out the destruction 
of the old Canaanites, who of right had not a single foot 
of land in Palestine — the men of whom you spoke in one 
of our earlier conversations ? If you own a moral plan 
of rescue, intervention and salvation running through 
human history, I do not see how you can stop with 
acknowledging that good men have a place. You must 
logically own that bad men, and also that evil influences, 
are also possible to the programme ; nay, that they must 
be used by God in his all-comprehending plan. There 
must be place for the laws of nature ; also, for the laws 
of human and of divine personality. This divine per- 
sonality will work sometimes on the very edge of the 
miraculous; and if it shall pass the line, it will not need 
any infraction of the laws of nature to accomplish the 
actually miraculous. That he usually employs fixed 
laws, is not by any necessity for him, but because that 
mode of action has better moral uses for us. And so 
wars in the natural course of human history are events 
provided for, God overruling them ; and occasionally, 
when interventions of miracles are necessary to the plan, 
the miracle will come, as well as the war." 



200 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

He said : " But the Hebrew wars, according to the 
Hebrew Scriptures, including frightful massacres, were 
expressly ordered of God." 

" You admit that God can order events, but would 
hesitate to admit that God can order events through men. 
Besides, you must not forget the peculiarity of the bibli- 
cal history. It is religious history. It is the religious 
side of historical events that is depicted. The writers 
are tracing a divine intervention in its progress unto the 
great intervention. Its point of view is God and his rul- 
ing and overruling. All things are seen as through the 
lens of the Divine Eye. Once get this point of view, and 
many a form of expression in the narrative is explained. 
Hallam writes his history from the point of view of the 
English Constitution. Macaulay writes from the point of 
striking biographies. Greene sees all things as related, 
not to the crown, but to the common people of England. 
Moses wrote from the point of view that sees a moral design 
in all things and all events. A mere naturalist, writing 
of the facts recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, would 
have given us the scientific outlook upon the creative 
process. Moses writes : ' In the beginning, God.' And 
he never drops from that key for a moment, whether 
he depicts nature, the doings of individual men, or the 
development of the world's history. Eesults, which an 
ordinary historian would refer to secondary causes, and 
correctly, are here referred to God's hand, or God's will, 
or God's word. They are seen as if they originated with 
God — not indeed in any such way as to make the moral 
acts of men free from praise or blame ; but the end is 
seen when speaking of the origin. A potent influence in 



PROVIDENCE AND FAITH. 201 

the mind of a great moral leader is written down as a 
direct command of God, and the formula is ' and God said/ 
It is the air and the tone of the narration, colored by the 
idea that all things are tending toward the advent of the 
Messiah. God has adopted human history — especially 
the history of the people foremost in moral ideas — as his 
way of developing his plan of restoration and salvation. 
He has taken a series of men, a series of facts ; and, so, 
if he will have himself understood as doing it, this con- 
stant idea must appear in the record which he directs 
and inspires. A narrative written from this point of 
view, and correctly written, would seem to be as necessary 
as is the ordering of the events themselves. Given, the 
facts with such a tendency, there is also required a Bible 
in which this tendency is everywhere evident. It would 
not do to trust the record of these events to any chance 
historian who did not see the trend and the determinative 
end. If it were worth while to have such a progressive 
intervention, it were worth while to have the story of it 
accurately given. The facts warrant the Book." 

He asked to what events I referred ? I replied : " Take 
such an event as the attempted sacrifice of Isaac, by 
Abraham." 

He interrupted me to say: "You have named the 
hardest thing in the Bible for me to believe." 

"Any harder than that other sacrifice, in which an- 
other Father also gave his only begotten Son ? " 

" But why do you put those two together?" 

" Simply because it is impossible to understand the 
former aside from the latter fact. It is the moral pur- 
pose of both that justifies either of them. The charge of 



202 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

unnaturalness is equally strong, or, as I would prefer to 
put it, equally weak, for each of the iustances. The 
final ends of a father are more than the exercise of paren- 
tal feeling. Indeed, in the human relation, the fatherly 
feeling has to be made subordinate to the moral good of 
the child, and even sometimes to the moral welfare of 
others outside the household. In the case of Isaac and 
of Jesus Christ, there is One who can decide whether 
moral ends existed of such a kind as to subordinate to 
such an extent the natural parental feeling. There might 
be a case in which God should see the ends when we 
could not see them. What if God saw that somewhere 
between the Flood and the Advent there was need of a 
peculiar moral demonstration of the thought that was 
always present in his own mind? "What if the idea of 
sacrifice was growing dim ? What if, as introductory to 
the Mosaic institutions with their various offerings, each 
preceded by a slain lamb, there was needed a most 
remarkable setting forth of the worth, the position, and 
the meaning of sacrifice as connected with salvation? 
What if, by some human father who had an only son 
whom he would give up in sacrifice, there was need of 
showing to the ages what God's love in self-sacrifice was 
like — as far as it could be done without the actual deed 
of slaying his human son? The human son must be 
saved, for he represents both method and result. In the 
case of Isaac the knife must be stayed, while in the true 
atonement the victim must follow the path of sacrifice to 
the end. What was slain on that occasion, as God in- 
tended it to bC; was the lamb caught in the thicket 
near by — the first of a series of lambs that were to bleed 



PROVIDED' CE AND FAITH. 203 

on Hebrew altars ; thus showing forth the coming ' Lamb 
of God, who taketh away the sin of the world.' What 
was saved on that occasion was Isaac, whose salvation 
typified ours. As with this incident so with many others, 
such as that of Jonah, whose three days' burial in the 
sea monster^ and whose new life on the earth were the 
setting forth of the resurrection fiict in our Lord's career. 
In like manner the healing by the brazen serpent gets 
its justification from its intended moral meaning.*' 

He asked : " Are you sure that you are not reading 
into these narratives a meaning not really there ? " 

" But these narratives must have had some moral pur- 
pose; and if not this, then none other has ever been dis- 
covered. Have you any other interpretation to suggest? " 

He confessed that he had none to ofier. 

I said : " You must also notice that our Lord sees this 
moral purpose in these events. He cites the story of 
Jonah's release after three days, when he is prophesying 
his own death and resurrection. The incident of raising 
the brazen serpent is directly adduced by Jesus, as show- 
ing his own uplifting on the cross. He said : ' As Moses 
lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the 
Son of man be lifted up.' And he seems to have con- 
nected this event in the wilderness with the unaccom- 
plished sacrifice of Isaac and Abraham. Isaac is called 
the 'only son' of Abraham. In Isaac inhered the 
* promises.' Isaac did ' not perish,' but had a greatly 
prolonged ' life.' And so it is that these facts give color 
and tone, and even supply the words in the various 
phrases of that great utterance of our Lord : ' For God 
so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, 



204 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but 
have everlasting life ! ' " 

There was on his face the far-away look. He was 
thinking profoundly ; and for a few minutes I did not 
disturb the Current of his thoughts. At length he turned 
to me, as if he would have me go on. 

I said, very quietly and solemnly: "In this looking 
back over history, with this clue, you are exercising an 
act of faith." 

He started and said : " "What do you mean ? " 

" Just this ; that in seeing the remarkable unity of 
moral purpose in all the biblical events and in this record 
of them, you are using an instinctive faith, the capacity 
for which is in every human soul — the faith that sees 
the new relations to the Father, and so trusts him in his 
way of restoration for man. You are taking hold of 
God's plan of intervention and salvation. You are begin- 
ning to trust him in the revelation of his great moral 
purpose that culminates in Christ." 

He said, very solemnly : " If so, I am afraid it is a 
poor faith. Is there not somewhere in your Bible some- 
thing about a man who said, ' Lord, I believe ; help thou 
mine unbelief?" 

I replied by asking : " Is the Bible any more my Bible 
than it is your Bible? Can you any more get along 
without this moral key to human history than I can?" 

He answered by a quiet " No." 

I said : " Then let us see, in this your Bible, God's 
incentive to our natural faculty of faith." 

He asked whether our faith did not depend entirely on 
the convictions of our reason. I asked him if a child's 



PEOVIDENCE AND FAITH. 205 

faith in its father and its mother depended on its reason- 
ing powers whereby it deduced the fact that father and 
mother were trustworthy. The truth is that the faith 
comes first, and comes naturally. There is a native ca- 
pacity for it; and only years afterward does it justify 
itself to the reason. So that the most reasonable thing 
under certain circumstances is faith. It is reasonable 
that there should be a natural instinct of truth in the 
child for the parent. It is exercised before there can be 
any reasoning about it. Whatever we men may be 
morally toward God now since we are sinners, in the 
original making of our natures there was capacity and 
potentiality, and so the possibility of our being actually, 
" the sons of God." The deepest thing in us, the ultimate 
fact about us is, then, not the capacity to reason, but the 
instinct of trust. It is anterior to reason, back behind 
reason farther in toward the core of our nature — this 
capacity for faith in God. It is the one ultimate moral 
fact in the final analysis of our nature. Given a God, 
who is by his nature a moral being, and given also a man 
who is by nature a moral being, the one of them a father, 
the other of them a son, and the final innermost relation 
of the two must be moral ; and the deeper moral action 
of a man's nature must be one of moral will, and choice, 
and trust — i. e., an act of faith." 

I continued : " You have been gaining the material 
of faith, on which it can act with larger intelligence, in 
these conversations. But, when in your sleepless hours 
last night, you put these things together, and looked 
along the course of the old-time history, and took in the 
fact that it was all one plan leading on to Jesus Christ, 



206 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

the great intervention, it was a look of faith. You 
felt that yoa could trust God with those old events. They 
drew out the slumbering capacity for faith. You took 
hold of them and of God in them, in a new way." 

He nodded his head in assent. 1 continued : " It 
remains now for you to give to God your own personal 
trust as he presents his Son as your Saviour. It is an 
act of soul toward him that you must do by and for your- 
self. It is as distinct and conscious an act of soul as 
would have been your act of body had you lived on earth 
when he did, and had he then and there bidden you rise 
and follow him." 

" I think I know what you mean," he said. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE NEW TESTAMENT MIRACLES. 

MR. B was ready for me when we next met. 
At the close of the last conversation, I had asked 
him, just as I was leaving, to join with me in the prayer. 
He shook his head. But at the final moment, as I 
pressed his hand, I told him that he owed it to himself to 
pray to God ; that he had not one doubt about the exist- 
ence of a personal God who could hear prayer ; that he 
had asked me to help him, and I had responded ; and it 
was only a reasonable thing also to ask God to help him 
to see these things more clearly ; that since Jesus Christ 
knew more about these matters than we, because, as all 
moral thinkers are disposed to admit, he was prominent 
as a religious teacher, we should consult him ; that since 

he (Mr. B ) had sought the aid of Jesus Christ by 

consulting his teachings in the New Testament, the one 
more obvious privilege should be used, viz., prayer ; that 
we had advanced far enough in our discussion to war- 
rant us in asking for forgiveness for Christ's sake. That, 
for an answer, it would be reasonable to look to what 
Christ had said about the forgiveness of sins ; that we 
were to expect that, if sin could in any way be forgiven, 
God would tell us so, and tell us by an authoritative 
teacher ; that this Teacher sent from God had told us to 
ask " in his name." 

He responded by saying : " But you forget that the 

207 



208 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

question with me is about how much credit I can give to 
what Christ says on that and on other subjects. It is to 
me a question of crediting him first, and then of believ- 
ing his utterances ; a question of any such hearty believ- 
ing him as to warrant me in seeking and taking his aid. 
I want light on who he really is before I can think of such 
a thing as going to God through him." 

I reminded him of the words of Jesus, "I am the 
way, the truth, and the life." I begged him to pray 
when I had gone. But he made no promise. I reminded 
him that his praying would be a test of his moral earn- 
estness in these matters. He did not respond by a single 
word. 

I began the interview, of which this chapter is the 
record, by asking directly the question whether, as a man 
sincerely wanting to know the truth, he had prayed to 
God since I saw him last. He said, after a little hesita- 
tion : " I don't know how to pray. I did try, but I could 
only think of one thing that I could honestly say. I 
said to God : ' God be merciful to me a sinner.' " My 
friend burst into tears, and could not go on for a little 
time. I waited for his agitation to subside, telling him 
meantime that God does not turn aside from the sincere 
prayer of a man for the forgiveness of sins. I ventured the 
suggestion that his rapid reading of the Gospel of Mark 
would help his dawning faith. He assured me that he 
had read that Gospel through, and that it had helped 
him in one way, but in another had suggested great diffi- 
culties. On asking what they were, he named the mir- 
acles, adding : '• I know they ought not to trouble me. I 
understand well that a supernatural Christ is the need, 



THE NEW TESTAMENT MIEACLES. 209 

and that a supernatural Christ should be super naturally- 
born, and that he should do supernatural works. I admit 
it all in general. But when I sit down before any one 
of the miracles, and study it in detail, I find myself say- 
ing, ' Can it be credited,' and a host of objections rise up 
out of the graves where I had buried them. I know 
they are ghosts ; but they haunt and worry me." 

" That fact does not in the least surprise me. Indeed, 
in thinking about the theme for to-day, I had so far an- 
ticipated some such feeling on your part, that I want to 
put over the subject of Christ's resurrection again. Let 
us come directly to the question of the New Testament 
miracles." 

His face lighted up in an instant. "Nothing," he 
said, " could give me greater pleasure. I want to take 
the side of the opposer, and you that of the defender." 

I replied that it was dangerous for us to argue against 
our convictions. It disturbed the delicate sense of 
truthfulness and honesty for one to do even momentary 
violence to his sense of right, though it was only to draw 
out another's views. That if there were a believing 
mood, in which he was more and more coming into sym- 
pathy with Christ, he must guard against injuring the ten- 
der germ, lest there should be no complete development ; 
that it would be better to put it in this way, viz., for 
him to state the objections, and then for us both to try 
and meet them ; since he and I had a common interest in 
having it true, if it were really so, and that Jesus Christ 
was worthy of being trusted. 

I selected the miracle of feeding the five thousand. 
He was to take his Triglot and read Matthew's version 

o 



210 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

of the story, keeping his English Bible open at Mark's 
version, while I should read Luke aloud, and name any 
variations or additions in John's narrative. We spent a 
few moment in noticing the facts omitted by one or in- 
serted by another, until the story was fully bef )re us. 
He said: "There are no serious differences in the four 
accounts. But there ought not to be the least difference, 
even in a single word, if the four men were divinely in- 
spired to record it." 

'' That would amount," I said, " to having one Gospel 
signed by the four men. What would the sceptics say 
to that? They would urge that it was one man's work 
in the invention of the story, and that he had produced in 
some way the signatures of the other three. Or, if four 
separate documents existed, it would be said that three 
men had copied from one. But four writers independ- 
ent, yet drawing from a common source, seeing the events 
through their own personality, and each having a slightly 
difierent end in view, and each writing possibly for a 
different class of men, and, in one case, for a different 
nationality, and each perfectly independent and utterly 
careless of any contradiction of the other's story — that 
is what we have in these Gospels. Their trustworthiness 
is immensely increased thereby. And as to their divine 
inspiration, it must be remembered that it is the divine 
inspiration of human faculties that is claimed for them ; 
an inspiration that allows and employs their individuality, 
and their honesty and their testimony as eye and ear 
Avitnesses. Their divine inspiration no more changes 
their style of writing, or their special purpose in group- 
ing: the facts, than it does the features of tlieir faces. 



THE NEW TESTAMENT MIRACLES. 211 

We have two inspirations: one of human genius, and 
the other of God's Spirit ; and they mingle freely. So 
that we can speak of an authentic document as we do of 
other documents submitted to our inspection ; and can 
also speak of a narrative as free from error, because the 
writers were divinely guided. But, strictly speaking, the 
question of the inspiration of these writers need not now, 
at this point, be considered. Afterward, when we are 
through with the examination of the story, we may find 
that its inspiration is a fair inference. Now we are con- 
sidering the four Gospels as so much human testimony, 
and asking about the credibility of a certain story in 
them." 

"Suppose,"' I continued, " you name any objections that 
occur to you.'" 

He replied: " I have heard it said that this miracle was 
totally unnecessary. All Jesus had to do was to dismiss 
the crowd, and let them go to the cities and towns a few 
miles distant and get food." 

" Yes, that might have been done, and something vastly 
worthy might have been sacrificed. Here are men hear- 
ing the ' gospel of his kingdom.' They may have come 
to the point of accepting discinleship. A few hours more 
may make a great difference in their spiritual position. 
Their eternal salvation may depend on staying with him, 
at that time, long enough to decide the great moral ques- 
tion of their whole existence. In such a case the miracle, 
with reference to that group, may be considered by the 
Lord as altogether necessary. He is the ultimate judge 
of the necessity in the case. Then, too, the people are 
to tell the story of the miracle to the world. It would 



212 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

make this teacher seem near to men — concerned about 
their bodily as well as their spiritual wants. In all ages 
the story would have helpftdness to men, as showing 
Christ's care for the common things that touch the body, 
while the great lesson would be the ability of such a 
Christ to feed men's souls with the bread of eternal life. 
It is impossible to over-estimate the moral worth of such 
a miracle through the Christian centuries." 

He suggested, also, the objection that the miracle had 
been considered by some as unworthy of so exalted a 
personage as Jesus Christ claimed to be ; and I called his 
attention to the fact that this homely miracle, and others 
like it, had made the human Christ seem nearer to men 
than those grander ones wrought on great occasions. 

He raised, also, the question : '' Can we not understand 
this event as substantially historical, and yet find no real 
miracle in it ? Paulus, or was it Renan, one or both, 
suggests that the crowd had brought with them their 
lunch ; that Jesus selected the boy who had the loaves 
and the few small fishes as a type of the lunch with 
which each group was probably provided, and that the 
blessing asked on the boy's lunch was asked really upon 
all the stores of food in the party ; that instead of the 
loaves multiplied by miracle, they were quickly, as if 
miraculously, produced, when the people were seated on 
the grass ; that everything was natural and nothing was 
miraculous, save in appearance." 

I said : "On this theory, somebody is guilty of decep- 
tion. Jesus, or his disciples who distributed the bread, 
or these four men who give us the record, are one and all 
untruthful. I do not see how we can clear any of them; 



THE NEW TESTA^EENT MIRACLES. 213 

for they are all either actors or participators in a kind of 
fraud. Not they only, for the story was instantly told, 
and these ' five thousand men, besides women and chil- 
dren,' knew whether the thing was miraculous or merely 
natural ; whether it was only sitting down to the lunch 
they had carried, or was an actual multiplication of the 
boy's loaves and fishes. If it was only a natural and 
non-miraculous afiliir, they would have said so by the 
hundred, and crushed in this way this new religion. 
Several hundred accomplices, or at least abettors in the 
fraud, are involved in the case. Among the throng must 
have been sharp-eyed enemies. They would know about 
the fact of Jesus pretending, or appearing to pretend, to 
feed the people, when they only fed themselves. It was 
no private gathering. Tliere was every chance for de- 
tection, were there the least acting at the time or the 
least overstatement afterward. Jesus did or did not rise 
and bless the loaves and fishes, and tell the disciples 
to feed the people with them. To own the event 
historic at all is to own it miraculous; for too many hun- 
dreds were involved for the least collusion, or invention, 
or mistake, or subsequent addition. Jesus, standing there, 
knew the actual facts. It is impossible to acquit him of 
connivance with a fraud that destroys utterly his char- 
acter, if the Renan theory is true. When we consider all 
that is involved in treating the incident as an actual one, 
and yet not miraculous, it is vastly easier of the two to 
accept the miracle just as it stands. Not one word of 
disproof, when hundreds could have said that they were 
there, and nothing miraculous occurred ; not one solitary 
word of denial or protest was raised when the story was 



214 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

told. Nor, when, afterward, the written gospel appeared, 
was there any charge that the miracle did not occur, or 
had not been told before in the " oral gospel." It was 
a case where contradiction was easy, if possible. It was 
told among men who were sceptical about miracles in 
general, who were especially sceptical about any that a 
man in the social position of Jesus might do, and who 
were more than especially sceptical as to a homely miracle 
like- this of the feeding of the thousands. It got itself 
believed, for the people on the strength of this miracle 
wanted to make him a king; so says the narrative, and 
the thousands there knew whether that was proposed by 
acclamation or not, since the story of the popular inten- 
tion was associated with th.e miracle. For here, as else- 
where, the writers of the Gospels put in these references 
to popular movements, which show how conscious they 
were of their own straightforwardness, supplying, as they 
frequently do, names and dates, and times, and familiar 
circumstances, as no writers would ever dare do who were 
foisting an imposture on mankind." 

He said there was one other theory. He smiled as he 
named it. It v;as '*that no such fact ever occurred, but 
that Jesus talked about himself in figurative language as 
the 'bread of life.' and that some of his enthusiastic 
friends changed his figurative words into historical 
language to exalt their Lord." 

I replied that I did not wonder that he could hardly 
retain a sober face when speaking of such an interpreta- 
tion. He would not claim such a theory for his own. I 
was sure. He rejoined that some man calling himself a 
.minister of religion had seriously proposed it; but I 



THE NEW TESTAMENT MIRACLES. 215 

begged him not to tlnDk any better of it on tiiat account. 
'•It was the theory of desperation. It met a supposed 
difficulty by creating a dozen others, each one of whicli 
was more difficult to believe than the miracle itself. It 
did not say when or by whom the alteration was made. 
If done, it must have been accomplished at once, while 
the disciples were repeating the " oral gospel."' The story 
of Christ's resurrection was told within two months all 
over Jerusalem. Tnis would bring up the miracles of liis 
life. The whole career of Jesus would be rehearsed. 
This, as a chief miracle with thousands of witnesses, is 
told. There is not time nor place nor conspiracy of circum- 
stances to allow a myth. The story-tellers of the 'good 
news ' were, some of them, alleged participators in the 
miracle, and knew whether these things were so, or whether 
Jesus had only used a figure of speech in his teaching. 
They knew whetlier tliere had occurred any alteration 
from figure to alleged fact within the three months after 
his death. Subsequently to those three mouths, cliange 
without detection in a matter of such vast notoriety was 
impossible. It is needless to point out the fact that this 
theory of figurative language does violence to every sen- 
tence of the four records. On another day and on a 
difi^ereut occasion Jesus called himself the 'bread of 
life.' And no descriptions can be farther apart than that 
which records the miracle and that which records the 
discourse in which he uses the figure. The effort to 
make the miracle a mere figure of speech, is not to inter- 
pret but to ignore the documents. The people who were 
partakers of the miraculous bread attempted to make 
Jesus a king. They knew whether the thing was ' all 



216 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

talk ' or not, whether the facts were correctly told at 
first, and afterward correctly written out. The whole 
sum of the circumstances shows something done rather 
than merely saidy 

Mr. B wished to propose one more theory of the 

miracle — not because it was his own, but because he had 
heard the theory applied to other, and especially to Old 
Testament events. He said : " Why may we not drop 
the inquiry whether any of those events are literally true ? 
We can get the moral impression of these things just the 
same even if they are ail fables and myths. So that the 
moral influence on us is just as good whether Jesus did 
or did not do the miracle. We can still talk of him as 
the ' giver of the bread of life ' — meaning thereby that 
his alleged teachings help us spiritually." 

I said: "Yes, we can still talk, in that Pickwickian 
sense, of these sacred things — and talk it will be ; and 
we shall know ourselves guiity of a pious fraud, and others 
will know it as well. The result, in the end, will be 
the of loss all honest conviction, not only on religion but 
on any other subject. We shall despise ourselves soon, as 
those who are playing tricks with language. We shall 
damage our own moral earnestness, and court for our- 
selves an intellectual infidelity on all quesiions of fact." 

He said: ''I have had enough of that floundering 
about in intellectual infidelity, until I had hardly any- 
thing, on any subject, in heaven or earth, tliat I heartily 
believed. I know it is a terrible mood of mine — the 
mood of universal doubt about facts. The mind loses all 
its grip. Its ])ower to take hold and to keep hold is 
gone. Have you read," he asked, almost vehemently. 



THE NEW TESTAMENT MIKACLES. 217 

"'Amiel's Journal?' It is the saddest book in modern 
literature. A keen and cultured critic has worked only 
by doubt on all subjects in art, in literature, and in 
religion, and the result is a mind utterly unnerved. The 
man at length doubts if he doubts. He is intellectually 
destroyed by just such processes of criticism as some 
would apply to these New Testament miracles. I know 
too well the danger to a man's brain — to say nothing 
about his moral honesty — of handling any subject in that 
way. I am just getting my feet on something substantial. 
I am in an agony for facts rather than fancies. I do not 
want any poetizing, but something actual and historic. 
This talk about it all being the same whether these 
miracles were or were not done ; whether these things 
are true or false, — it is not so ! The ' moral impression ' 
is not the same. Besides, the moral impression is not the 
whole of what a man in my position wants. I want to 
know whether this Christ can be trusted as one who is a 
Saviour ; and the greatness of the miracle has to me a 
great deal to do with the greatness of the miracle worker. 
I have used scraps of the biblical phraseology all my 
life to embellish a sentence, and to round off a period. I 
have quoted many a biblical incident as I would a Greek 
myth. But I am in no mood for that now. Are these 
things facts f That is my great concern to-day. The 
bearing of these facts, not so much on myself as on Christ's 
own character as Teacher and Saviour, is my inquiry 
now. Every miracle bears on the question of him as one 
able to say,' Thy sins be forgiven thee.' I want to know 
whether the world has a supernatural Christ as an actual 
fact. And I have no patience with this style of treating 



218 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

the miracle, the feeding of the multitude, or any other. 
And, by the way," he continued, *• you must have been 
led by a higher wisdom than your own to choose this 
subject to-day. For I was thinking before you came in 
that I could not recall any great miracle which Christ 
himself did. The incarnation was God's miracle, so was 
the resurrection — though we haven't considered that yet; 
but if the incarnation is granted, the resurrection would 
accompany it as a fit fact. I was tliinking that Christ 
himself, in his own proper person, should do some one 
great miracle. And then you brought in this one of the 
miraculous feeding. It is a miracle, if he ever did one. 
And, as I said before, I cannot allow any one to say that 
the impression is the same whether it be fact or fancy." 

He had spoken so long and so earnestly that he was 
a good deal exhausted, and I begged him to exert him- 
self less, and let me finish the interview. He assented, 
but said he would like to know how I would meet the 
last theory he had named, not indeed as his own, but as 
one he wanted to oppose. 

I remarked that he had disposed of the theory from 
the moral side. But I wanted to add that if this method 
of treating facts " as of no consequence,*' except to get 
poetry out of them, were to be adopted, I could not see 
where we were to stop. 

Continuing, I said : " May we go through human his- 
tory in that way? If so, what will be the result? Is 
every historic fact to be deemed credible and valuable 
exactly and only as it has a moral influence on us? 
Must we treat the great characters of history also in the 
same way ? It will be no matter whether a given person 



THE NEW TESTAMENT MIKACLES. 219 

really lived or not, since his moral influence is just the 
same on this theory. All the later work of Niebuhr on 
Roman history, and all that critical work done centuries 
before Niebuhr on the Gospels in separating the true 
from the false, is in vain. Fancies are the equals of facts 
on this theory. We need noc any more ask whether a 
given man ever lived. It would be all the same, on this 
theory, if Christ had never really lived and if God had 
never existed. The reign of phantasy has taken the 
place of the reign of fact. 

" Now then, all this is without foundation. Truth is 
truth whether it hurts or helps. The existence of an 
eminent man who has done a great work in God's plan 
of revealing himself, is a factor rhat cannot be dropped 
out of the account. Take it in modern history. It does 
make all difference whether Napoleon really lived ; for 
be altered the map of Europe, His moral influence, by 
way of example, is the smallest thing about his career. 
He did something. Grant's moral influence, by way of 
example, is not very large. But he saved a nation. He 
was great for what he did. So in religious history, it does 
make all difference whether Paul did what is claimed for 
him, or was a merely imaginary character affecting the 
world by his supposed example. It does make all differ- 
ence whether Christ is a fictitious being whose inventors 
put him into positions in which his conduct is our ex- 
ample, or whether he actually lived and wrought out our 
redemption through the deeds he did and the death he 
died. It does make a difference whether David and 
Solomon lived, reigned, established the Kingdom of Israel, 
and so did work preparatory to the advent of the Mes- 



220 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

siah ; whether Abraham was a fiction or his career a fact. 
These great souls of the olden time were men full of 
faith — i. e., they were faithful workers in God's plan of 
providing rescue for the race through the coming Christ. 
These massed series of great facts have their divinely 
appointed place. They are parts of tiie one great his- 
toric religion. They are, of necessity, among the things 
contributory to Christ. The moral influence of the men 
through example, is the least of all they have done for 
us. They have put into the kingdom of God certain 
great facts. These facts have changed the whole moral 
history of the race. It was their work as factors in God's 
plan that chiefly blesses us. Their deeds made up the 
religion we inherit. Especially is it true of Jesus Christ 
that his deeds as Son of man and Son of God are essential 
not only as affecting us by example, but they are a part 
of the work wrought for us. They are all needed in the 
making of the ' eternal redemption for us,' through which 
we have the forgiveness of sins and the heavenly inlierit- 
ance. Each miracle has its fit place. One teaches of 
Christ's dominion over nature as he stills the storm on 
the lake, another of his power over the grave as he raises 
Lazarus, and yet another shows his power over the world 
of evil as demons are cast out, while the transfiguration 
splendor shows that the dwellers in the world of the holy 
are so allegiaiit to him that at his call they leave the 
ministratious of heaven for the service of the Christ on 
earth. And not one of these events is a detached mira- 
cle ; not one of them is a characterless freak of power. 
They are moral truth expressing itself in physical fiict. 
They all bear on the calminating redemption. And this 



THE NEW TESTAMENT MIRACLES. 221 

miracle of the feeding has its place as a homely, practical 
miracle, meeting a transient physical and a perpetual 
moral want, and adding to the conviction of every care- 
ful student of it, that Jesus was the Christ, and can be 
trusted with the redemption of our souls.'' 

I told him that I wanted to sum up the evidence for 
the miracle. 

" Jesus calls it, the next day, a ' miracle.' The evan- 
gelist also calls it a ' miracle.' The people recognized it 
as a miracle, and on account of it sought to make him 
king. It appealed to their sight, their touch, their taste, 
and, in the words of it, to their hearing. There were 
five thousand men participants in it, ' besides women and 
children.' The four documents, universally appealed to 
by friends and foes of the new religion as authentic, all 
record it. Two of the writers w'ere witnesses by eye and 
ear and touch and taste ; three of them, if Mark's Gospel 
be considered as having Peter's authority. The inci- 
dent is absolutely uncontradicted by a line of opposite 
testimony. But the new religion, including this miracle, 
succeeded in getting itself believed, in the most critical 
age the world ever saw, among the foremost thinkers 
who have left the deepest marks on the race. And 
with every rising and every setting sun, the number 
increases of those who call this Jesus their Lord, and 
who entrust to him all the most precious things of their 
deeper spiritual life." 

He said : " I know what it means for me to say that I 
admit the miracle." 



CHAPTER XVI. 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 



MR. B was more feeble at our next interview 
than I had previously seen him. He was still sitting 
in his reclining chair at the usual place fronting his 
library window. But though so manifestly ill, he insisted 
that I should remain, if I could, for the usual hour's con- 
versation. 

I told him that I wanted at some time to give a full 
hour to the Old Testament prophecies of Christ ; to 
show how men were especially selected each being in- 
tended to represent some single great virtue, preparatory 
to the final gathering of all virtues into the final Christ ; 
to show him that there were prophetic deeds done by 
these men, and prophetic national events that fairly over- 
flowed with richest moral meaning in connection with tlie 
one great and glorious appearance of the Messiah ; that 
there were prophetic rites loaded down with the weight 
of Christly prediction, and a divinely given service for 
the temple worship which had not only its daily lamb 
ofiered morning and evening, but its Passover and Day 
of Atonement — the whole mighty sum of these prophetic 
outlookings having one and one only fulfillment in Jesus 
Christ. 

Some of the most thoughtful students of the Bible, I 
said, have been willing to risk the whole of Christianity 
on the argument from prophecy. 

222 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 223 

Mr. B signified his desire to go over tiiat argument 

at some other time. As lie hesitated about naming a 
subject that was evidently on his mind, I took up my 
notes on " Christ's Resurrection," which were lying by 
me. He noticed the act and asked if I had the same 
object in view in presenting this theme, as in discussing 
the miraculous loaves and fishes, viz. : the proof of the 
trustworthiness of Christ ? 

I replied that this was in part the reason, but that the 
resurrection of Christ showed resurrection a possibility, 
and so that our resurrection was not an incredible thing ; 
while the direct promise of this risen Christ that he 
would raise us up " at the last day," made what was on 
other grounds a probability become to us a grand cer- 
tainty ; that Christianity sought salvation for the whole 
man ; for his body as well as for his soul and spirit. 

I called his attention to the honor God put upon 
Christ's person by his resurrection, and to it also as God's 
endorsement of the claims of Jesus to be the supernatural 
Son; that Christ's ascension, which was his completed 
resurrection, was a kind of visible reception of him, and 
thus was not only the natural finale to his career, but 
was God's own testimony to the world that he had all 
confidence in Jesus Christ, and that we should therefore 
believe in him. 

He said that the subject was a great one, but much too 
difficult for him at that time. He had thus waved aside 
the two themes I wanted to enter upon. There were a 
few moments of embarrassed silence, when he suddenly 
burst out with — " Don't you think a man is bound to act 
as far as he believes ? " 



224 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

I assented, of course, Avondering what would follow. 

He continued : " I have been trying to do so in this 
matter; but it is a desperate struggle. When I \\ as a 
boy I saw in an old copy of ' Pilgrim's Progress ' a fright- 
ful wood cut of Pilgrim in the valley fighting with a host 
of miserable, misshapen demons, with Apollyon at their 
head. That is just where I am when I try to do anything 
practical about this matter. A great brood of demon 
thoughts comes crowding on me. All the objections I 
have ever heard, or have had of my own come back. It 
seems as if an invisible hand let them loose on me. I 
try to fight them down one by one, but it is tedious work. 
I know they have no real force, but they haunt and 
worry me. Vainly I say that I can answer these objec- 
tions in some good degree. They do not come because 
they are reasonable, and reason does not scatter them. 
I suppose it is the old habit of years asserting itself; the 
old mood so hospitable to objections and so inhospitable 
to religion. I am sure there is little or nothing in these 
suggestions, but they are persistent. I seem to have been 
thinking backward all my life on this subject, and it is 
hard to think in a straightforward way. They are, I am 
certain, the old echoes of my former self. There comes 
up my old theory of a non-personal God ; the old ques- 
tions about why God need have had a Son ; the suggestion 
that there may be some mistake, and Jesus Christ be not 
real, or if real, the accounts of him not correct, and so 
he, as we know him in the Gospels, be not trustworthy ; 
the temptation not to care, as I used not to care, for the 
most parr, whether these things are true or false — and yet 
I know that I do care and I do want some such being to 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 225 

trust as Jesus Christ is ; the fear that there may be some 
mistake about the forgiveness of sins, and that we may 
be led to think he will forgive, when we have no adequate 
reason for the belief — all the devils of doubt come flock- 
ing about me with mocking lips and jeering tone. I 
summon the other side — the good angels of the Christian 
beliefs, and when they come — but they do not always 
come for the calling — I give them hearty welcome. For 
I am getting to see that the only way out is through some 
such opening as that of Christianity. I am coming to 
get a glimpse, perhaps I should say a glimmer. I see 
that there is light in that direction. But the thing is not 
clearing up for me as I had hoped it would. I am 
fighting my way through all these obstacles into a better 
position. I think you can hardly understand what all 
this conflict means for me ; for you were never sceptically 
inclined. And this struggle comes on whenever I try to 
do anything practical." 

His phrase " do anything practical " a little puzzled 
me, and I inquired of him his meaning. 

He said : " Why do you ask that? Of course I mean 
that these things trouble me when T try to pray. That, 
I take it, is the practical thing for me now to do. I ought 
to put this matter in actual and personal practice, in so far 
as I see it true and feel it right. It seems to me that the 
grandest thing a man can do is to pray intelligently and 
heartily and honestly to his God. It takes in every- 
thing of our belief. It gives up the wretched controversy. 
It is owning up, practically, to the truth. It is the prodi- 
gal coming home. I cannot imagine a greater act than 
for a man with his whole soul to pray. It is the highest 

P 



226 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

exercise of manhood, if one can only do it aright, — there 
is the difficulty — to do it aright. It means so much to 
a man in my position truly to pray. I think," he said, 
after a moment's pause, " that I am knocking at the right 
door, but it does not open as I could ^yish. If one could 
only know that God heard him, that would be the best 
thing in all the world." 

" For what, specifically, are you praying ? " 

" Sometimes for nothing at all, only that God would 
just hear me. It would take out the anguish of this 
loneliness if God would simply hear. Sometimes, too, 
the longing to know that one has the forgiveness of sins 
takes possession of my mind. It would be a great thing 
if one were assured that his sins were taken way." 

I ventured to ask, " What sins ? " 

He looked up with a good deal of surprise, and with 
some reproach in his tone, he answered : " You know very 
well that my whole religious position has been wrong ; 
the whole tone of my feeling has been antagonistic to 
God and to Christ. My attitude toward the Christian 
religion has been inexcusable. I thought I had been 
thinking, when I had only been objecting. I welcomed 
everything against religion." 

Pointing to his open Bible on the table he continued ; 
" I took all my ideas of this religion at second-hand, and 
from objectors at that. The least I could have done was 
to study the original document of the Christian religion, 
the Bible, for myself, so as to know who Jesus Christ 
really is. If I have wronged myself a good deal, I have 
wronged him more. It is worse than a blunder; it is a 
wrong. It is no use now to go into particulars. The 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 227 

whole spirit of my life has been not what it should have 
been toward God and Jesus Christ, and the claims of 
religion. I have looked down with a kind of pity on 
Christians as from my height of intellectual superiority, 
and something of my feeling toward them I have had 
also toward their Christ. In such a case the greatest 
need is to get that matter righted by the forgiveness 
of sins. This is the thing for which a man should 
pray." 

He continued : " I have been reading the Psalms. 
The writer, or, rather writers, of quite a large number 
of them, seem to pray a good deal, but they pray as if 
they did not get much from it. Some of them have very 
little sense of forgiveness as actually secured." 

I said : " That is because, from their historic position, 
some of them did not foresee the Christian facts. Now 
and then they get a glimpse of the larger truth, and 
write, ' There is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest 
be feared.' But often those men did not see the phe- 
nomena which our Christianity unfolds — the way of for- 
giveness through Christ. They had other and approxi- 
mate pleas. They urged God's greatness and their own 
littleness. ' I am a worm and no man.' ' For thine own 
name's sake.' ' Hear and answer, for I have trusted in 
the Lord.' ' For thine own mercy's sake.' These and 
similar pleas are used. For every man who prays must 
use a plea, must ask for a reason which he names, that 
God will hear him. He pleads sonship, or service, or 
appeals to pity, to offerings brought or to repentance ex- 
ercised — to some plea or other, every time he prays, all 
of which points onward to the great reason for hearing 



228 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

prayer — the atonement and intercession of Jesus Christ 
so fully brought out in the New Testament." 

He said something about the Divine Fatherhood, but 
added instantly that all our nineteenth century thought 
emphasized law, and that both science and philosophy 
must emphasize the idea of a God — if it owned a God — 
who was a law-maker and a law-worker : that prayer to 
God might perhaps be an act of a child toward a father 
when the childhood relation was once established. The 
two ideas seemed to him antagonistic. 

I replied that the Christian system maintained both 
conceptions, and then harmonized them, and therein 
showed the breadth of God's truth over against our 
human narrowness. It was clear that a million facts, 
which any man could see for himself, called for the 
recognition of some other relation in God than mere 
fatherhood. No father — if there were not some other 
relation than fatherhood — would do any one of the ten 
thousand things for his children that God does for men. 

He interrupted me to say that to press the fatherhood 
idea alone would do more to make mere infidels than any- 
thing else. " I used myself to say that this idea of God 
was absurd in itself, and exactly contradictory to the 
facts in the case, as every thinking man might see for 
himself God cares for something else than making men 
happy, judging from the world about us." 

" But," I said, " you must not forget that ' God is 
love.' " 

"How will you prove that?" he said, somewhat 
sharply. " Who can strike the balance between the sad 
and the glad, and so mathematically demonstrate it? 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 229 

Besides, reasoning from that one premise that God is 
love, there ought not to be a sad fact in his universe." 

" I do not strike any balance sheet. No man could 
do that. But I have one fact, viz., God's gift of his only- 
begotten Son to die for us, that we might have eternal 
life. That true, if all the sad facts were a thousand-fold 
more sad, still it must be that, in some way, he is love 
after all. It is love saving men from the penalty of 
moral law. It is God proving himself loving by an un- 
paralleled self-denial in the surrender of Jesus Christ. 
This Christian system recognizes law, and emphasizes 
sovereignty in God. It does not set God as the God of 
love on one side, and God as the God of sovereign law 
on the other ; but in Jesus Christ it harmonizes both, so 
that God can be a just God and the Saviour of men. 
Thinking alone of the claim tiiat God is love, I do not 
see how a man could pray. For his whole mind and 
soul would rise up in rebellion against a God who made 
such a claim in such a world. Thinking alone of God 
as a holy sovereign whose law we have broken by our 
sin, we could not pray for him to be unjust enough arbi- 
trarily to remit just penalty. The twofold harmonious 
conception of Christianity invites us as sinners to pray 
that, for Christ's sake, we may be forgiven. And what 
our reason declares, God's Spirit also teaches us, as he 
persuades men to pray." 

He remarked, after a moment of thought, that none 
of our interviews had helped him more than the one in 
which I had pointed out for his reading the exact words 
used by Jesus Christ on the subjects of forgiveness and 
of the future life ; and he asked me if I would find for 



230 HOUES WITH A SCEPTIC. 

him, in his Bible, the chief verses that had a bearing on 
prayer." 

I turned to Paul's letter to the Romans, the eighth chap- 
ter and the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh verses. He 
said : " These are Baul's words, rather than those of Christ." 

" Then you give more credit to Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
and John than to Paul?" 

" With reference to them I own some sort of an in- 
spiration. They have to report the sayings and doings 
of a supernatural person, and I can see how there ought 
to be enough of divine guidance to make their narration 
exact and reliable." 

" Exactly so. You have given a good definition of 
inspiration. But if the narrators needed superintendence 
from above to keep them from error in what would be 
appealed to as authoritative documents, do you not vir- 
tually admit the need of divine inspiration for some 
others whose documents just as much need it ? Take the 
case of the prophets who foretold Christ, and who would 
need not only a different kind but a higher degree of 
inspiration. Take the case of Paul, a man on whom de- 
volved the logical statement of the dogma or doctrine he 
had received from Christ. Such men need especial guid- 
ance. Paul was a reasoner, as Luke was a narrator ; each, 
in his own way, was to be an authority in the writnigs to 
which friends and foes would alike appeal. Then, too, 
on this question of prayer, Paul is peculiarly to be con- 
sulted, for he was himself a man of prayer." 

He said : " I can understand that inspiration is needed 
for the records of Christian fact. But Paul is the author 
of doorma." 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 231 

"Are you not wrong there ? Paul is a reasoner rather 
than a dogmatist. He reasons on the facts and the 
teachings — i. e., dogmas of Jesus Christ. We want 
Christ's words or dogmas given accurately. And we 
want the natural and logical inference^ therefrom stated 
carefully for the thinkers of all ages to consult. Jesus 
promised his apostles the inspiring Spirit, who should 
lead them, as apostles, into all truth. If he spake truth- 
fully, some of them must have received this inspiration. 
"Who were they, if not these men who wrote these Epis- 
tles, and why are their writings so inspired, if these are 
not?'- 

He waited a few moments, tlien took up his Bible, 
open at the chapter and verse I had indicated, and read 
very slowly, aloud, the words : " Likewise the Spirit also 
helpeth our infirmities ; for we know not what we should 
pray for as we ouglit. . . . And he that searcheth the 
hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because 
he maketh intercession for the saints according to the 
will of God.'"' I called his attention to the idea of the 
circularity of prayer, as described in this verse. Prayer 
starts in God, and, first sweeping downward in its gra- 
cious curve, it afterward mounts up again to its heavenly 
source, completing thus the circle at the point whence it 
started. He read the verses again with a kind of sur- 
prised look on his face. And, finally, he said : " This 
one verse answers completely all the objections to prayer 
that I ever heard raised. The substance of them all is 
the absurdity of a little prayer lifted here in a corner of 
the universe affecting the perfect plans of the great God. 
But if the true prayer starts always with God, then all 



232 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

the force is gone from the objection. Oh, if one knew," 
he continued, " that the Spirit was moving him to pray, 
and was praying, as it were, through him?" 

'' And why have we not a right to believe that when 
we would heartily pray, he is with us, moving the 
prayer ? Surely you cannot be more anxious to offer a 
true prayer than he to have you. He is the inspirer as 
well as hearer of prayer. Could he be unaware of the 
struggle you say you have had in trying to pray ? Is he 
not, as you recognize him, ready to carry you through 
your host of difficulties and objections to the place of 
audience with God ? Believe in the Holy Spirit as the 
Spirit of prayer, when you go to pray." 

He said : " I do believe that, in a certain intellectual 
way. I want to take hold of it morally as well. A 
man's whole soul should yield itself to this Spirit." 

I replied that he did not doubt his own sincerity in 
praying, nor yet his earnestness ; that the act of the soul 
in yielding to God's Spirit was a very simple one ; that 
he could rely, practically, on a friend's word as to pecu- 
niary aid, and lay his plans in business accordingly ; 
that he was to pray confidently, his doubts dispersed by 
the accepted promise of God's aid in prayer, since Jesus 
Christ had promised the Holy Spirit to those who seek 
this blessing. I urged him to take fast hold on this most 
helpful fact in his prayer. 

He replied that this was a practical fact, and that he 
should be sure to use it. He marked the text with his 
pencil, as though he felt that he must read it again. 

I found for him, next, the words of Christ in John's 
Gospel, the fourteenth chapter, and the sixth verse. He 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 233 

read aloud : " I am the way, the truth, and the life ; no 
man cometh unto the Father but by me." I remarked 
that the words forbade other ways of approach, but in- 
vited us to come in this way. That true of all duty and 
of all service we render to God, the words had especial 
emphasis in the matter of our prayers. 

He replied : " This involves the substitution of Christ's 
excellence and worthiness for our own. But, though I 
have always objected to that idea, I do not see but we, as 
sinners, are driven to it." 

I said : " Would it not be better to say that we are 
drawn to it by what he has done for us ? One of your 
difficulties has been the getting near to God, the getting 
yourself heard by God, the finding of the way to God 
practically. Here is the open door. You have not to 
push it open. It is as wide open to you as it is to me. 
We do Christ a greater wrong than ever before if we, 
because of any pride or reluctance, do not enter. Thou- 
sands of men have come to God through Jesus Christ. 
They find audience; they gain answer. One of them 
says, ' We have redemption through his blood, the for- 
giveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.' 
It is worth while for a man to try this way. More than 
this ; whatever may be true about God's acceptance, for 
Christ's sake, of the prayers of those who do not know 
that Christ is the only way, we who know of it cannot 
now seek at all with any hope of acceptance in any other 
way. For, with our knowledge of this as the required 
way, it would be a bitter wrong to Christ to try to come 
to God in any other. It would be also impossible that 
he should hear us." 



234 HOURS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

I dwelt at some length on this fact of Christ as " the 
way," and I urged him to take Christ as his own way to 
God in prayer. 

To my surprise he said : " I do not see why a man 
should want to take any other." 

At my request he next read aloud the words of Jesus 
in the fourteenth of John's Gospel, at the thirteenth verse : 
" And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, 
that the Father may be glorified in the Son." I pointed out 
the fact in the verse, that Jesus stood so closely related 
to God that it was for God's glory or praise for him to 
respond to any request made by his Son ; and the Son, 
in return, lets us use his name in our prayer to the Father. 
This is the great plea, without which all others are un- 
availing. It must be always understood, if not expressed 

in our petitions to God. I said : '• You, Mr. B , with 

your former experience, know very well the worth of a 
name in securing commercial consideration. The ques- 
tion of ' whose name is on his paper,' is a vital one in 
business. The question of whose name we plead in prayer 
is even more vital. Prayer is the presenting of a reason, 
the offering of a plea. It is not enough to plead our 
want; for all men are in want, but they do not therefore 
get forgiveness. Our goodness we cannot plead ; for the 
plea would falter on our lips when we stood in the pres- 
ence of God. We need a ' name above every name.' 
We need a Saviour whom, because of his redemption for 
us, God has ' exalted to give repentance and the forgive- 
ness of sins.' " 

He stopped me to ask if the words I had just used were 
not a quotation from the Bible, and if so that I would 



LEARNING TO PRAY. 235 

turn to them. Finding for him the verse, he slowly read 
the words aloud, then turned back and read once more 
the verse about asking in Christ's name. He remarked : 
" This is a perfect theory of prayer. Do you remember 
that I said a little time since that prayer included every- 
thiug, involved all religious truth ? Well, it is certainly 
so. I ought to hold this thiug steadily. But the un- 
reasonable objections of years ago have a sort of auto- 
matic continuance. And yet I hope to get out some time 
into the clear liglit. I see a glimmer now. The light is 
in this direction. Prayer will be easier for this talk, and 
— pointing to his Bible — for these explanations of it.'" 

But he recurred again and again to the idea of light 
as dawning on his mind. He seemed to think of a path 
over which he must go and find additional light as he 
went on in it. 

On his table was a hymn book, evidently belonging to 
some member of the household. In it I found Dr. J. H. 
Newman's remarkable hymn, and begged leave to read 
it. The first words startled him and fixed his attention, 
as I read : 

" Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, 

Lead thou me on ; 
The night is dark, and I am far from home, 

Lead thou me on ; 
Keep thou my feet. I do not ask to see 
The distant scene ; one step enough for me. 

"I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou 
Should' st lead me on ; 
I loved to choose and see my path ; hut now, 
Lead thou me on ; 



236 HOUKS WITH A SCEPTIC. 

I loved the garish day, and spite of fears, 
Pride ruled my will. Kemember not past years. 

" So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still 

Will lead me on. 
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 

The night be gone; 
And with the morn those angel faces smile. 
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile." 

The efiect of the hymn was almost overpowering upon 

Mr. B . He sat like one entranced. He was not a 

man given to tears, but the tears were falling. I said : 
" Now let us both pray. You will follow me with your 
prayer." He nodded his assent. My own prayer ended, 
he began his prayer for light, for God, for forgiveness. 
But it was interrupted by his emotion, and I took up his 
sentences and finished for him his prayer. As I rose to 
go he said : "Ido hope God has heard our prayers to-day. 
Leave the book open at Newman's hymn on Light. It is 
just my case." 

It w^as my last visit. One week after, I called again. 
He was too ill to see me. His disease took a rapid turn 
for the worse, and in two days my friend had gone into 
that world of the " Kindly Light," where shadows do not 
gather and where doubt shall be no more forever. 



INDEX. 



Adam 173, 174 

Amiel 217 

Arnold, Sir Edwin: "Light of 

Asia" of 12, 13 

Arnold, Matthew 49, 50, 61, 72 

Atheism: and "outside power".... 53 
vs. personal purpose in universe 54 

nature's recoil from 73 

Atonement 129 

Christian doctrine ol 149 

judged from moral standpoint... 150 
affirmed by consensus of human 

thinking 151 

owed to God. 152 

repentance not enough for.. 153, 156 
Authority : wanted in reli- 
gion 126, 129 

Bible: moral standpoint of 83 

the, not chargeable with man's 

sin 119 

best proof of itself. 182 

Browning, Kobert : quotation 

from his " Cleon " 107, 108 

quotation from 197, 198 

Buddhism 12, 65, 66 

Bushnell: quoted from 166 

Butler: dictum of 29 

Calderwood : referred to 63 

Calvin: reference to 159 

Carlyle: remark of 25 

Cause, First: inquiry for 70 

Character: transference of. 159 



Cheops: pyramid of. 78,79 

Christ: miracles of, befitting him.. 45 

as " Desire of all Nations" 91 

in and of the race 174 

death of; necsssity for 192, 193 

resurrection of 223 

Christianity: the owe religion 14 

a unique religion 15 

a historic religion 18, 127 

alone truthful 19 

facts of, within historic limits... 32 

for us 105, 106 

moral fitness of 110 

resume of 112 

facts of, preceding New Testa^ 

ment record 113 

element of certainty in 134 

providing propitiation for sin... 148 

providing for right living 157 

Coleridge: reference to 116 

Confucianism 12 

Conscience: capable of retroac- 
tion 146, 147 

Deliverance: through a Man of 
men 93 

Diman,Prof.: Theistic Argument 
of. 64 

Discipline: related to moral diffi- 
culties 75, 76 

Documents, Christian : credibil- 
ity of 29 

Doubts : haunting former posses- 
sor 224, 225 

237 



238 



INDEX. 



Eden : far-reaching influence 
thereof. 80 

Environment : accounting for 
moral evil 142-144 

EiTor : human reasoning liable to 71 

Events, Old Testament: moral 
purpose of 202, 203 

Evidence: weight of 28 

credible, obtainable 30 

Evolution: a mode of doing 52 

Faculty, spiritual: in man 86,87 

Faith : capacity for 205 

Fatherhood: of God 155, 228 

Fichte 50 

Fiske, Prof. John 50, 51, 63 

Fisher, Prof. George P 64 

Five thousand: the miraculous 

feeding of. 209-219 

Forgiveness : in Old Testament 

writers 227 

Genesis : agreeing with geology... 16 

God: immanence of. 49 

transcendence of 49 

vs. " impersonal necesssity " 53 

the personality of 55, 56 

difference between personal and 

impersonal 61 

sovereign maker of right 61 

and human suffering 74 

moral intervention by 81, 82 

a specialist in religion 121, 122 

holding other relations than 

the paternal 155, 156 

all-comprehending plan of.. 199-201 
the love of 229 

Gospels, the: veritable history 33 

not invention of their times 96 

Apocryphal ; characterizations 
of. 96 

Great religions : the 12 

Harrison, Frederick 49 



Harris: mentioned 64 

Hseckel: reference to 58,59 

Heredity: doctrine of 140, 141 

principle of transmission in 159 

History : characters of, did some- 
thing 213 

Hume : argument from 38, 39, 43 

Huxley, Thomas H 49 

quotation from 114-116, 118, 136 

Incarnation, the : a moral fact 

170, 171 

problem of. 172 

expression of God's wisdom... 

175, 176 

story of. 177, 178 

Independence, Declaration of: 

soon will be illegible 35 

Infidelity: needing authority 130 

Inspiration: allows for individu- 
ality of writer 210,211 

definition of 230 

in the epistles 230, 231 

Intervention : the idea gradually 

unfolded 89, 90 

Christian; unfoldment of a di- 
vine thought 109 

Janet : " Final causes" of. 63 

Jesus Christ: character of 94, 95 

corresponding with highest 

moral ideas 97 

different from the characters 

and teachinE;s of his day 100 

sinlessness of, involves divinity 102 

related to the future 104, 105 

revelation of immortality by.... 108 

to restore man's lost sonship 120 

not simply "with a genius for 

religion" 124, 125 

competent authority 126 

a peculiar Saviour 133 

Law: idea of exalted 154 

pitiless 158 



INDEX. 



239 



Lectures: Bowen's, Lowell 15 

Life, the new : Christ's words 

about 184-190 

future: Christ's words regard- 
ing 194-196 

Lotze: quotation from 60 

Mahomet 93 

Martineau, Harriet : quotation 

from 57 

McCosh: James, Pres 64 

Ministers : related to modern ob- 
jections 47 

Miracles: disbelief in 22 

not incredible 38 

inferences from facts 40 

not impossible 41, 42 

not incapable of proof 43 

demanded as credentials 5.. Ill 

the natural development of 

Christianity 167 

difficulties pertaining to 208, 209 

each has a fit place 220 

Miracle of the loaves: evidence 

for,summed up 221 

Mohammed : religious system of... 13 
Myths: of slow growth 98 

New Testament: endorsing the 

Old 16, 32 

origin of, in Augustan age 33 

documents of, historically accu- 
rate 33 

as a literary fact to be ac- 
counted for 33 

originals of, lost 34 

writing older than, accepted 34 

writings older than, authentic... 35 

Christian ideal from 98 

miracles of, timed to the event... 168 

miracles of, to be expected.. 168, 169 

Newman, J. H. : hymn of 235, 236 

Old Testament, the: objections 
against 17 



Osiander: idea of... 159 

" Ought " : notions expressed by, 
fixed 53 

Penalty: demanding a future 81 

Person, an Infinite: and moral 

scheme of things 60 

Personality: of soul and God; 

moral argument for 72 

Plato 93 

Porter, Noah: Pres 64 

Prayer: a practical thing 225,226 

circularity of. 231 

through an intercessor 233, 234 

Prophecy : Christianity related to 222 

Redemption, blood-bought: com- 
mon to human history.... 162, 163 

Eeligion : Mosaic ideas of. 13 

difficulties in 29 

questions on, vital 131 

Religions : man's most unfortu- 
nate things 85 

racial; expressions of man's 

need 117 

Penan: theory of. 212,213 

Eight: trend toward, in God 50 

the; man's relation to 103 

Righteousness : sense of, in the 

soul 73 

Rousseau: remark of 96 

Salvation : God's plan of. 204, 205 

Saviours : twelve or one 132 

Schopenhaur: referred to 60 

" Sense, moral " : a fact 68 

Shakespeare : quotation from 137 

Sin : the violation of law 59 

not an abstraction 92 

a fact 136-138 

expression of, in Scripture 138 

perplexity of 145 

Sins: forgiveness of. 207 

Soul, the: existence of. 67 

not body acting in another way 68 



240 



INDEX. 



Soul, certainty of its existence 69 

a reasoning entity 69, 70 

argument for immortality of.. 77, 78 

present state of, a beginning 79 

Spencer, Herbert: phrase of. 

49, 51, 54-56, 63, 72 
Spirit, Holy: illuminating men... 88 
Substitution : no interests jeopar- 
dized by 160 

inwrought in human thinking... 

160, 161 
Suetonius. 93 

Tacitus 93 

Theory: V5. fact 27 

Truth : not made by man 71 



Tubingen, school of: theory not 
well founded 99 

Universe, the: and impersonal 
theory 54 

Voltaire: quotation from 27 

Witness : differing from evidence. 44 

"Witnesses: credibility of. 24 

trustworthiness of 44 

competency of 128 

Wordsworth : Ode on Immortality 

65,66 
Word, the : made flesh ; the want 
of humanity 102 

Zoroaster 93 



